Abstract
The migration of the transportation from conventional combustion engine vehicles to friendly-environment electric vehicles needs charging stations along the roads and in the houses. These battery charging stations are power electronic devices that cause harmonic distortions in the distribution networks. This paper proposes a novel switched filter compensator (SFC) device that is connected at the AC side of the battery charger to solve the power quality problems and prevent the propagation of harmonic distortions in the distribution network. SFC is two capacitors connected in parallel and connected in series with arm-filter. The operation of SFC is based on the intermittent switching between two capacitors to configure a complete arm filter. The design of the SFC aims to mitigate the highest value harmonic orders and compensate the required reactive power to enhance the charger power factor. The on-board battery charger and the proposed SFC are built using Matlab Simulink environment. The voltage and current waveforms at the AC and DC sides of the charger are monitored, analyzed and compared with and without the connection of SFC. The results ensure that the battery charger with SFC has the capability of mitigating the harmonic distortion and improving the system power factor and has no influence on the charging current, voltage and charging time of the battery charger.