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The paper deals with a grid-connected single-phase battery charger integrated with photovoltaic generators (PVGs). The circuit topology consists of a multilevel architecture based on a Cascaded H-Bridge (CHB) rectifier. Its main task is to charge the batteries, primarily from the PVGs, by also assuring to keep their state-of-charge (SOC) balanced. Nevertheless, when the battery SOC overcomes a predefined upper limit, beyond which the charging process could be interrupted, the available PV power can no longer be transferred to the batteries. Therefore, to avoid an undesired curtailment of PV power production, this latter can be supplied to the grid by inverting the system operation. The paper shows how to achieve this result by implementing a dedicated control action based on a multi-step procedure. Numerical investigations are carried out on a 19-level CHB converter implemented in the PLECS environment to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed control technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new mathematical model of modular multilevel converters for battery electric vehicles with space-vectors enabling a critical analysis of cell balancing for the battery management system. In particular, the requirements for power balancing and the actual number of degrees of freedom of the control are investigated. The paper shows that the traditional approach of cell balancing is a special case of the proposed control methodology. Numerical analyses with Matlab/Simulin™ highlight the reasons of the slow response of the standard balancing technique for specific operating conditions of the battery electric vehicle. The paper suggests potential improvements that could be introduced through the proposed generalised approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]