Design and Implementation of Electric Vehicle Charging Load Integrated

Test system

Chunlin Guo1,a , Wen Chen 1 , Zhongjun Chi 2, Zongfeng Li1, Xiaojuan Liu 3
1
State Key Laboratory of Alternate Electrical Power System with Renewable Energy Sources，
North China Electric Power University, Beijing 102206，China
2
State Grid Beijing Electric Power Research Institute, Beijing, 100075 China
3
State Grid Beijing Electric Power Company, Beijing, 100031 China,
a
gcl@ncepu.edu.cn

Keywords: EV, load integration, test system, battery model, charging load Characterization
Abstract. With the growth of EV number, large scale penetration of EV load may bring problems to
the LV distribution network, such as voltage sags, transformer overload, circuit overload and etc. It
has become a hotspot in related fields to study the impact that EV implementation will bring to the LV
distribution network. In this paper, a set of EV charging load integration test system was designed and
developed to deal with the shortcomings of the existing study means. The system can simulate
charging load of various types of vehicles, and versatile set of convenience, security and scalability in
one. With this system we carried out some studies of EV charging load characteristic modeling，
including the establishment of the models of battery of EV and the charging static load of EV, which
will be helpful to the researchers of EV in some degree.

Introduction
With the growth of EV number, large scale penetration of EV load may bring problems to the LV
distribution network, such as voltage sags, transformer overload, circuit overload and etc.[1]-[4]. It has
become a hotspot in related fields to study the impact that EV implementation will bring to the LV
distribution network.
One way to study the charging load characteristics EV (electric vehicle) is using specified software
to simulate the load of EV. In [5], the simulation model for different types of charging machine was
established, and the harmonic caused by different types of charging machine was studied. Although
the simulation method has low cost, short development cycle, etc., the simulation model is idealistic,
sometimes difficult to simulate the actual situation.
Another way to study is field measuring. In [6], the researchers went to a EV charging station to do
some field measuring to study if active filtering device can achieve lower voltage and current
harmonic distortion. However, field measuring can be more accurate than modeling. But in the station
the testing condition can change with the number of charging EV, and the test circumstance can not
be adjust as we want.
So we present a scheme to integrate the charging load of EV so that we can study the charging load
characteristics safely and conveniently. The paper is divided into 4 parts. Part 1 is introduction; The
second part describes the design and implementation of the system, including the charger and battery
selection, other key equipment selection and related hardware and software development and
debugging, the design of protection system and monitoring system; Part 3 describes the combination
of the present system of research, establishment of the model of EV battery research and the static
load model of EV charging. The last part is to summary the work of the paper.

Design of the Experimental System

The overall design. The overall design program consists of three elements:
(1) Charging load configuration
 System includes two sets of cars charging device and 3 sets of charging device of public vehicles.
Through this mix of typical battery, the test system can effectively simulate EV load, and can be more
conducive to study large-scale integrated experimental load. The parameters of battery is in Table 1.
Table. 1 Parameters of the batteries of the EV load integration analog system
Parameters of Li-on Haima Midi 8t pubilc vehicle 8t pubilc vehicle bus
battery 1# 2#
Nominal voltage /V 307.2 384 96 96 91.2
Operating Voltage /V 270-331 300-438 90-100.6 90-100.6 900-100.2
Nominal capacity /Ah 75 60 200 200 360

(2) Main Circuit Design

Figure 1 is the electric vehicle charging load test system integrated main circuit topology. The
main circuit uses a single-bus wiring to the AC charging and discharge device powered buses. Cars
are connected to the charging pile through the cable. The main circuit added shunt trip relay unit
series with the detector as a safety device that can promptly disconnect the power when the detector
senses the alert signal.
U V W N LN LN Power LN
module sensor1

QF6 10A/1P DC Sensor2

QF6 10A/1P sensor3

AC
UPS
QF6 10A/1P sensor4
QF 100A/4P
Power Alarm
module BMS1 host

DC BMS2

AC BMS3
RD1
BMS4
SA BMS5

Shunt trip
AC 380V
A
B
C
N

AC charging pile
FV
L N

L
N

Charging and discharging Charging and discharging

device for cars device for public vehicles
Figure 1 Main circuit topology of the EV load integration experiment system
(3) Integrated Enclosure design
Figure 2 is the schematic herein of EV charging load integrated test system. Internal test system
passenger load discharge device and buses arranged a charge and discharge, it is an integrated
charging cabinet design according to the size of each device and the coupling relationship. Integrated
charging cabinet is divided into two layers, the upper layer placed charger, the battery is placed in the
lower and the two layer are connected with a soft link.

1#8Tpublic 2#8Tpublic
Charger Charger Charging
vehicle vehicle
for midi for haima module
charging charging
for bus
module module
AC
char
ging Battery of
1#8T battery
pile midi
Bus battery
Battery of
2#8Tbattery
haima

Fig. 2 Structure of the analog system

Protection system. To improve security of the system, the integrated experimental system are
designed to set up a multi-layer protection system, which includes:
(1) Hardware protection: hardware protection is using a conventional protective devices such as
circuit breakers, fuses and other protection;
(2) Monitoring system software protection: software protection system can monitor the respective
device status and display it on the host workstation and control the corresponding switch state;
 (3) Equipment-level protection: device-level protection prevent important device, such as
charging module, from being destroyed by adding a diode, current transformers and isolation switch.
Also, the protection of charging machine is of great importance for the system. The Charger
protection processes is shown in Figure 3.
Circuit overcurrent

Level 1 Line overvoltage / Circuit

failure undervoltage breaker trips

Charger Communication
failure failure
Output overcurrent
Level 2
Stop
failure
charging
Battery failure

Fig. 3 Charger protection processes

Monitoring System. Integrated monitoring system has the following features categories: module
control, data acquisition, switch control, interactive features, event logging.
As shown in Figure 5, Communication monitoring system and charger exchange information via
the CAN and Industrial Ethernet.
Midi charger CAN
Converter

Haima charger CAN

Ethernet Ethernet Ethernet
CAN
1# 8T charger Switch Data Work
server station
2# 8T charger CAN

Bus charger CAN

RS485

RS485
Sensor 1
Alarm host
Sensor 2
RS485

Sensor 3 RS485

Sensor 4 RS485

Fig. 4 Structure of the monitoring system

The implementation of the Integrated test system and the study of charging load characteristics
The implementation of the Integrated test system. According to the design principles and
requirements of the development of the EV charging load integrated test system, we built the test
system. The overall physical map shown in Figure 6.

Fig. 5 Physical cabinet of EV load integration analog system

Experiment and modeling of battery. When studying the influence of the charging load of EV on
the distribution system, we often focus on the external characteristics of battery. Thus, in this part a
model describe the external characteristics of the battery is built. The assumption of the model is as
follows:
(1). Ignore temperature and battery aging and other factors on cell performance;
(2). The polarization characteristics of the battery equivalent to DC resistance, which does not
change with the charge and discharge current size and number of cycles;
 (3). Assuming the battery charge and discharge process has no difference in performance, battery
charging and discharging has no influence on the parameters.

Fig. 7 Basic circuit of the battery model

Figure 8 is a basic model of the battery. Studies have shown that: When the battery is in
equilibrium, the open circuit voltage of the battery state of charge with its monotonous fixed
nonlinear function [7]. Combining the model of Shepherd and Nernst model, the battery model can be
explained with equation 1:
⎧
⎪
⎪ U1 = U ocv + Ri
⎪
⎪ 1
⎨U ocv = a + b ln S oc + c ln(1 − Soc ) + d + eSoc (1)
⎪ Soc
⎪
⎪ Soc = Soc0 +
∫ iΔt , 0.01 ≤ S ≤ 0.99
⎪⎩ QN
oc

We used intermittent discharge method to establish the battery OCV- SOC curve. During the
study we found that the five packs battery of the test system can be divided into three categories.
[8] showed, when SOC in 0.3 to 1.0, the same temperature for the battery DC resistance stays
unchanged. Therefore, during intermittent discharge of the battery, when the battery SOC is
0.9,0.8,0.7,0.6,0.5 and 0.4, the voltage change value recorded in the 15s before discharge, battery
DC resistance calculated as follows:
ΔU
RX = (2)
I
Where Rx is the DC resistance of different SOC, ΔU is the voltage change during 15s,I is the current
of discharge. And we averaged the Rx of different SOC and finally gain the DC resistance. Combing
the experiment data, the parameters of five packs of battery can be gained using MATLAB fitting
toolbox. Table 2 shows the parameters of five packs of battery in equation (1).
Tab.1 Parameters of the battery models
parameters Haima Midi 1#8T 2#8T Bus
a 325.20 261.77 95.01 95.34 89.3
b 7.42 -138.32 -2.22 -1.98 -1.52
c -1.28 3.49 0.24 0.2 0.31
d -0.47 -27.04 -0.58 -0.56 -0.43
e -8.48 180.08 6.28 6.24 1.24
R 0.508 0.543 0.453 0.482 0.43
Figure 8 is fitted curve and the experiment curve comparison chart. The fitting error is less than
0.9%.
 400

350

300

Uocv(V)
haima experiment curve
250 haima fitting curve
midi experiment curve
200 midi fitting curve
public vehicle expriment curve
150 pubilc vehicle fitting curve

100

50
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
Battery SOC(%)

Figure 8 OCV-SOC diagram of the simulation and the experiment result of all batteries
Static model for EV charging load. In this paper, the polynomial model of static load model is
used to build the model of EV load. Ignoring the frequency characteristics of the load, the polynomial
model is expressed as follows:
⎪⎧ P = P0 [a p (U / U 0 ) + bp (U / U 0 ) + c p ]
2

⎨ 2
(2)
⎪⎩Q = Q0 [aq (U / U 0 ) + bq (U / U 0 ) + cq ]
⎧⎪ a p + b p + c p = 1
Where ⎨ .
⎪⎩ aq + bq + cq = 1
Using haima battery , the system power factor, reactive power, active power, current values were
recorded under different voltages during a test voltage adjustment procedure and they were shown in
Figure 9.

Figure 9 Each amount of the voltage adjustment process on the AC side versus time
(1) Static model of active power. From Figure 9 we could conclude that active power does not
substantially change with the change in voltage. So the value in equation (2) can be gained : ap≈0,
bp≈0，cp≈1 ， P0=2.12kW.
(2) Static model of reacive power: we used MATLAB to do parameter identification with the result
of Figure 9 , and gained : Q0=164.36Var， aq =-2.7×10-3, bq =1.53, cq =-0.52. And the fitting curve is
as in Figure 10 :
Q(Var)

u(V)
Figure 10 Model of static load of reactive load
The RMSE (Root mean squared error) is 0.086, and the R-square (the square of the correlation
between the response values and the predicted response values) is 0.9998. The Goodness-of-Fit
statistics show that the model is good to demonstrate the static characteristics of charging load of EV.
Summary
In this paper, a test system which integrate various EV charging load was present to deal with the
shortness of current means to study the load characteristics of EV charging load. And the main
conclusions are as follows:
(1) With the integrated cabinet and charging load, the system can simulate charging load of various
types of vehicles, and versatile set of convenience, security and scalability in one.
(2) The system include various protection measure and comprehensive monitoring system which
can secure the system
(3) The physical system was established and the load characteristics of EV was modeled with the
system, which verified the function of the system and at the same time offered a lot of experience to
present researchers.

Acknowledgements
This work was financially supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central
Universities and the National High Technology R&D Program of China (863 Program)
(2012AA050804).

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