Theses and Dissertations
ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9043-8863
Issuing Body
Mississippi State University
Advisor
Karimi-Ghartemani, Masoud
Committee Member
Fu, Yong
Committee Member
Choi, Seungdeog
Committee Member
Marufuzzaman, Mohammad
Date of Degree
5-12-2023
Document Type
Dissertation - Open Access
Major
Electrical Engineering
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D)
College
James Worth Bagley College of Engineering
Department
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Abstract
There is a growing interest in electric transportation, and the number of electric vehicles (EVs) is increasing. The resulting increase in EV charging power demand has an adverse impact on the existing power grids, especially the distribution transformers. The repeated and continued overloading caused by EV charging can significantly reduce their operational life. This dissertation aims to comprehensively study the adverse impacts of EV charging on distribution transformers and provide robust and practical solutions to mitigate it. A typical North American secondary distribution system with different EV penetration levels and four realistic residential EV charging scenarios are used for the analyses. The IEEE Standard C57.91-2011 is used to quantify transformer life under different scenarios and to validate the efficacy of the proposed overloading mitigation strategies. It is observed that EV charging can have a significant impact on the life of distribution transformers. To mitigate the impact of EV charging on the distribution transformer, first, a practical solution based on reactive power compensation is proposed. The method is based on reducing the over-
all transformer losses by providing a component of the residential reactive power demand through non-unity power factor operation of the EV charger. A centralized recursive control structure is proposed to compute and communicate the required reactive power values to the individual EVs. It is shown that the proposed technique increases the distribution transformer’s life by an average of nearly 47% in all four scenarios considered. Moreover, the proposed controller’s structure makes it effective even on low-bandwidth, high-latency communication networks. To verify this, the proposed controller’s stability under communication delays and its robustness against potential communication failures is also validated. This research also studies potential concerns about the charger’s reliability by non-unity power factor operation. Accordingly, an alternative overloading mitigation strategy is also proposed based on fixed charging current magnitude. This second method is shown to be more effective in reducing transformer overloading at the cost of a marginal decrease in the charging rate. Lastly, a high-level overview of the existing vehicle-to-grid communication standards is presented to provide a better context for practical implementation and identify potential challenges.
Recommended Citation
Jain, Akansha, "Mitigating adverse impacts of increased electric vehicle charging on distribution transformers" (2023). Theses and Dissertations. 5752.
https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/td/5752