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Charging Strategy for Electric Vehicles Using Solar

Energy
A. M. Alsomali, Member, IEEE, F. B. Alotaibi, Member, IEEE and Ali T. Al-Awami, Member, IEEE


Abstract-- Public charging networks for Electrical Vehicles
(EV) is on the rise, with more than 1.3 million EVs deployed
worldwide [1]. Whether for economic benefits (higher price per
KWh for a faster charging) or for the sole purpose of priority, it
has become a point of interest to set a strategy on how to
prioritize EVs charging from a single network, especially if the
power source is limited as in the case of renewable energy. In this
paper, a strategy will be proposed for charging networks based
on category prioritization. Time-multiplexing the power supply
using controllers is the key component of this network logic,
which will enable the network to control which EV gets more Fig. 1. Private and Public Charging Points Globally from 2010 to 2015 [1].
time being supplied with power and this control structure will
also overcome the state-of-charge bias. A scenario of a shaded In this paper a time-multiplexing method is proposed and
office parking with solar panels as power source was used to test tested; thereby contributing a simple yet effective method of
the strategy, simulation and experiment were carried out to
achieving prioritization of EV charging. This method utilizes
validate the control logic, simulation and experimental testing
was successful and results showed this time-multiplexing method controllers which are connected to relays between the EV and
can enable the EV charging station to give priority to certain EV charging points, over a certain period, the controllers will
to charge faster and prevent the SOC from being the main drive allow EVs to charge by different portions of time thus leading
in case of limited power source. to higher priority EVs to charge faster by giving it biggest
portion of the charging cycle. In the experiment and simulation
Index Terms— Charing Strategy, Electric Vehicles, Solar models the EV as a battery and thus the terms “EV” and
Energy, Controllers, Time Multiplexing
“battery” will be used interchangeably throughout this paper.
I. INTRODUCTION This paper organized as follows: system configuration and
control scheme is discussed in Section II. Then, simulation of
The growth of the publicly accessible charging the method and experimental results are shown and discussed
infrastructure is comparable to the growth of the global EV in Section III. Section IV is for conclusion and further
stock. Publicly available slow and fast chargers experienced investigation recommendations.
similar rates of growth in 2015, 73% for slow and 63% for fast
[1]. For reference, Figure 1 shows the growth of publicly II. SYSTEM CONFIGURATION AND CONTROL SCHEME
available chargers over the past 5 years.
This system consists of three main parts. The first one is the
Pulse-Width-Modulation (PWM) chargers connected directly
While some businesses offer charging for free for their
after the PV panels, to step down the voltage to a constant and
employees, in addition to some libraries, department stores and
acceptable level for the batteries. The second part is the relay,
public utilities offices, most of the available public chargers
which is responsible for interrupting the power flow coming
are owned and maintained by private companies that provide
out from each charger and act like switches. The last part is the
that service for certain fees.
controller, which controls the switching of the relays in a
specific manner
The aim of this paper is to design and evaluate a charging
algorithm that will prioritize EVs and fill some faster than
others. This approach can be utilized by private businesses to
categorize and lower the fees for charging, making EVs more
attractive economically. The scenario considered for this paper
is an office building parking lot that is shaded by solar
photovoltaic (PV) panels.

Fig. 2. System Layout

A single board Microcontroller (i.e. Arduino) was used to

control the switching of the relays with different algorithms,
taking into account the priority for each battery. Besides, an
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important feature into the control part, which are the simple
switches that act like sensors of the cars’ (batteries) presence
in the parking lot. Thus, the charging algorithm will change
depending on the number of cars (batteries) connected to the
system. Proposing a three battery scenario for the purpose of
elaborating the logic during a single charging cycle, the
possible cases for charging given Battery#1 has highest
priority then #2 then #3 would be as following:
1- All three batteries are present
2- Two batteries are present, which has two probabilities:
a. Either battery# 2 or battery# 3 is OFF:
b. When battery# 1 is OFF: Fig. 3. All possible cases for 3 Batteries in one charging cycle
3- When only one battery is present.
III. SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENT

A. Simulation:
SIMULINK and Matlab were utilized for the purpose of
making for testing the control scheme. The biggest challenge
encountered during simulation was the involvement of two
different Simulink families; Simscape for designing the solar
panel and SimPowerSystems for designing the chargers and
batteries. Therefore, an interface circuit had to be built to
transfer the charge from the panel to the chargers.

Fig. 4. SimPowerSystem to Simscape interface circuit

This interface circuit connects the solar panel from

Simscape to SimPowerSystems, by first measuring the output
current of the panel through a current sensor then converting
the physical signal to a Simulink signal then feeding it to the
controller current source provided by SimPowerSystems to
supply the chargers.
Due to the above mentioned factors, scenarios were limited to
four hours only and three batteries. If it was more than four
hours it would take days to finish, and more than three
batteries would fill the laptop memory faster and end the
simulation. This should be sufficient to study the change in
State-of-Charge in charging strategy and the current
distribution over the batteries.

In the switching methodology, all the EVs are going to be

present at the same time and charge together for half of each
cycle. Understanding how the power is going to be distributed
among these cars during this cycle is needed. In this test, all
batteries are going to be present during the whole simulation
period (120 mins) and each battery is going to have a different
State-of-Charge. The input irradiance was constant ( Ir= 1000
W/m^2). As expected, the battery with lowest SOC (20%
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initially) draws more current than the other batteries leading it

to charge faster. TABLE 2
SOC CHANGES SWITCHING IMPLEMENTED WITH CONSTANT IRRADIANCE
Initial SOC Final SOC Increment

Battery 1 30 % 64.4 % 34.4 %

Battery 2 30 % 53.5 % 23.5 %

Battery 3 30 % 48.7 % 18.7 %

The switching method worked as expected in giving Battery 1

higher priority. In practical the battery will not charge this fast
but in this test the irradiance is held constant at 1000 (W/m2)
allowing the panel to generate high current, but in real life the
Fig. 5. Current drawn when all batteries connected current will fluctuate depending on the irradiance. This is
going to be discussed in the next test.
As can be observed from the plot, the battery with lowest SOC
had the largest share of the distributed power. Results are In this simulation, an array of irradiance is going to be fed into
summarized in the following table. the solar panel instead of the constant irradiance done in the
previous parts. The accurate array of irradiance was
TABLE I
downloaded from NASA’s website and used in following
CHANGE IN STATE-OF CHARGE FOR HALF CYCLE ALL EVS CONNECTED
Initial SOC Final SOC Difference
simulation. It had a Gaussian distribution curve with maximum
irradiance value at 10375 W/m2 occurs around 12:28 pm and it
Battery 1 50 % 63.1 % 13.1 % becomes zero after 7 pm. The test was done with four hours
starting from 10 until 2 pm to capture the peak of irradiance.
Battery 2 30 % 45.3 % 15.3 % The generated current has the following shape with maximum
current around 12:30 pm aligned with the input irradiance..
Battery 3 20 % 37.4 % 17.4 %

For half of the charging cycle, the EV with lowest battery will
charge faster than the other EVs regardless of its priority.
In the second simulation, the switching algorithm was
implemented using switches and pulse generators, each pulse
had a period of 3600 seconds (1 hour) and the duty cycle
depends on the priority of the car i.e. 75% for the medium
priority and 50% for the low priority while the high priority
was connected directly to the charger with no switch to keep
charging at all times. All the batteries had 30% State-of-
Charge initially and the irradiance was constant at 1000 W/m2. Fig. 7. Solar Panel output current with accurate irradiance input

Using Time-multiplexing method yielded the following

distribution of currents over the period of simulation.

Fig. 6. SOC Changes when switching implemented with constant Irradiance

Fig. 8. Time-Multiplexing method currents distribution

The method has successfully distributed the current from solar
panel over the batteries giving higher current to the higher
priority battery and vice versa.
B. Experiment:
Following configuration shows the setup of the hardware in
the experiment.
Fig. 9. Hardware system layout for the experiment
This part contains the PV Panels, Chargers, Controllers and
Batteries. Specifications of the above mentioned. PV
Characteristics @ STC (1000W/m^2, AM 1.5 Spectrum, Cell
Temperature 25C are:
Peak Power Pm : 100 W
Open-Circuit Voltage Voc : 22.5 V
Short-Circuit Current Isc : 5.65 A
Maximum Power Voltage Vmp : 18.9 V
Maximum Power Current Imp: 5.29 A
Power Output Tolerance: 5%
Two solar panels were used for the experiment and connected
in parallel. Giving an optimal voltage of 18.9 V and 10.6 A at
STC conditions, and a total power output of 200 W typically,
although the actual data was not provided by the PV OEM.
However, the power, voltage and current of a PV panel will
vary with temperature. Due to varying operating conditions
during the actual implementation, expected values listed above
will vary to some extent
Below is an actual IV curve plotted from data retrieved from
solar panels at 2:00pm in the afternoon on a partially cloudy
day.
Fig. 10. PV I-V Curve
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Batteries were sized to have a capacity somewhere in between
a quarter and a third of the total energy expected to be
generated daily. This is mainly because three such batteries
were to be used in implementation to obtain comparable
results to the simulation and want to ensure that PVs have the
ability to charge them fully. Typically, a panel generates 4 to 6
times its maximum power in energy. Thus, expected daily
energy output is in the range of 800Wh to 1200 Wh. Each of
the three batteries has a capacity of 216 Wh.
The control part of our implementation is composed of the
following:
x Arduino Controller
x Relays
x 2 small 12V battery
x Relay Interface circuit
Arduino controller was used for its ease of programming. Its
main advantage is the programming language is very similar to
the C++ language which is convenient. In addition to that, the
algorithm required for implementing the Time-Multiplexing
method was simple and did not require a controller with
special features.
Relay interface circuit was needed because Arduino can only
provide a maximum of 5V and 40 mA which is lower than the
24V required to trigger the relays. This created the need to use
an external small battery to provide the needed 24V and an
interface circuit that switches this 24V to the relay through the
Arduino’s output signal.
Fig. 11. Arduino to relays interface circuit
The interface circuit is made from a 2n2222A BJT switching
transistor. It is a simple circuit that switches one of the relay’s
terminals to ground and since the other is always connected to
24V’s, the switching to ground allows current to flow through
the relay and activates the switch. The BJT is switched from an
Arduino output.
It is worth noting that initially, relays were placed between the
chargers (Steca PR-1010, 10 A, 45V) and the battery. The
charger used in the experiment didn’t cope well with the
battery getting disconnected and reconnected during the
charging process and gave multiple error messages. Thus,
relays were moved to the source side of the charger putting it
between the charger and the source which worked well.
Experiment was conducted with all batteries discharged to
almost an equal level. To measure the results during the
experiment, battery voltages were recorded every half an hour.
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There is a direct proportionality between a battery’s voltage VI. REFERENCES

and its state of charge.
[1]
Thus, recording the voltage levels of the batteries during their
charging process would be an indirect way of measuring their
[2]
SOC. Experiment were conducted and recorded the voltage
levels of the batteries for 2.5 Hours. The data collected
confirm that control scheme worked as intended and closely
[3]
matches the simulation result. Fig. 12 shows a graph of the
data collected.
[4]
J. Teter, M. Gorner, P. Cazzola and W. Yi, "Global EV Outlook 2016"
International Energy Agency, 2016, pp. 25-26.
Kehyani, Ali. 101 Design of Smart Power Grid Renewable Energy
Systems. New Jersey: Wiley, 2011. John Wiley & Sons, INC.,
Publication. 16 Feb. 2013.
M. Jordan, “UC3907 load share IC simplifies parallel power supply de-
sign,” Application Note U-129, Unitrode, 1991–1996.
K. Siri and C. Q. Lee, “Current distributed control of converters
connected in parallel,” in Proc. IEEE Industry Applications Soc. Conf.,
1990, pp. 1274–1280.

Fig. 12. Data collected from Experiment. Voltage Vs Time

As time passed the battery with the highest priority, priority 1,

charged up to the highest battery voltage, i.e. highest SOC.
The battery with priority 2 came next and last as expected was
the battery with priority 3. It is worth mentioning, that the code
in the controller (Arduino) followed one minute cycles where
as the one used in the software simulation uses a one hour
cycle.

It is worth noting after two hours and a half of conducting the

experiment chargers malfunctioned which limited the
experiment time. The chargers were not designed for outdoor
operation, especially in the summer in a hot county like Saudi
Arabia. This problem was encountered around noon time.

IV. CONCLUSION
This paper discussed Time-multiplexing method, a strategy
to charge EVs from solar energy. This method proved to be
successful by simulation and experiment in charging EVs
different amount of energy based on priority. Further
investigation of this method can be carried to reduce the
charging cycle time, and study the effect of constant switching
on the battery lifetime.

V. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of
Ahmed Al-Harthi, Bader Alrasheed, Musab Al-Shankeety and
Rakan Alotaibi for their support on the experiment.