Real-time simulation of V2G operation for EV
battery
Ravindra B. Kuhada, Anandsingh P. Chauhan, and Naran M. Pindoriya, Senior Member, IEEE
Dept. of Electrical Engg., Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India
Email: rbkuhada@gmail.com, anandsingh.chauhan@alumni.iitgn.ac.in, naran@iitgn.ac.in
2020 21st National Power Systems Conference (NPSC) | 978-1-7281-8552-1/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/NPSC49263.2020.9331873
Abstract—EV batteries have a significant energy storage poten-
tial that can be used in the demand side management and as the
arbitrary storage. As most of the charging stations facilitate Grid-
to-Vehicle(G2V) framework, this work aims to achieve Vehicle-
to-Grid (V2G) integration of an EV battery as well. The bidi-
rectional charger of an EV supports the V2X (Vehicle-to-Grid,
Vehicle-to-Home) feature, which can help in handling demand-
side resources and can be used to reduce the peak demand
of electricity in order to gain economic benefits. The DC-DC
bidirectional converter and active front-end (DC-AC) converter
with the detailed control methodology has been discussed in this
paper. The DC-AC converter controls the power flow of the
energy transmission of battery to the grid and vice versa and
passive filter is used to reduce the harmonic distortion. Along
with the maintenance of constant dc-link voltage, the DC-DC
bidirectional converter adjusts current according to the control
input given to the active front-end converter. The proposed model
is simulated and tested in a real-time environment using OPAL-
RT and the obtained results are as per the expectations.
Index Terms—Grid-to-vehicle (G2V), Vehicle-to-grid (V2G),
Battery discharging characteristic, Synchronous reference frame
(SRF), Bidirectional converter
I. I NTRODUCTION
The Paris Declaration on Climate Change and Electric
Vehicles (EVs) is an essential element in the change from
bio-fuel-based vehicles to EVs, aiming to deploy 100 million
EVs worldwide by 2030 [1]. India has set up a goal to achieve
30% roadside electric vehicles by 2030 and expected to save 5
crore litre fuel every year to reduce 5.6 lakh tonnes of annual
carbon emission.
In India, EV technologies are growing with the use of
unidirectional chargers of charging level 1 and 2. Due to
the limitation of the unidirectional charger, the potential of
discharging battery is not used at an extensive level. Currently,
charging of an EV is an uncontrolled process where the
EV plugged to the charger at a fixed power and charges
until the SoC is 100%. The specific feature of electricity
feeding back on the power grid, V2G is the most promising
opportunity to use EVs in the power system by converting
established charging facility to smart charging. Smart charging
is an excellent resource in the grid due to its flexibility of
varying the charging power, the ability of both charging as well
as discharging, and intelligent functionalities as sustainable,
low cost and efficient charging environment. It increases the
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flexibility of charging by controlling the charging power and
its flow direction [1], [15]. In addition to charging EV from
renewable (solar, wind), it can be made more sustainable, and
the rapid growth of V2G networks will increase the distributed
storage capacity significantly.
V2G can provide a way to produce revenue for the con-
sumers by supporting abundant scale RES and benefit to both
the system operators and vehicle owners. In certain energy
markets, it is economically viable to supply electricity to their
microgrids, for example, V2X (vehicles to the grid(V2G),
vehicles to the household (V2H) and vehicles into the building
(V2B). If multiple vehicles are connected to the grid, the
charging of EV’s batteries will control the frequency when
the power generation exceeds the demand for load, and when
load demand surpasses the generation, it will discharge. So, the
V2G system can help to regulate frequency and grid voltage
to match the power generation with the load demand.
The economic analysis and financial return for the con-
sumers of the V2G technology have been carried out in [1].
A comprehensive review of different EV, PHEV, and its V2G
capability with power electronics strategies have been carried
out in [2]. Review work on V2G technology, including dif-
ferent EV charging strategies and its effect on the distribution
grid, has been carried out in [3]. A bidirectional charger for
plug-in-hybrid EV to support V2G for the power configuration
of American household circuitry has been discussed in [5]. A
case study using the inverter DC link capacitor to mitigate
the reactive power is provided in [4], and the impact of V2G
on the battery is also carried out in it. The integrated power
train traction and converter topology to have bidirectional
flow between vehicle and grid have been discussed in [6].
Renewable energy integration into the charging infrastructure
has been considered. It also compares the different converter
topologies for the EV charging, also addressed in it [7]. The
demonstration of V2G for frequency regulation from an EV
has been carried out in [8]. Work on the hierarchy frame
for the V2G application and the mathematical model for
smart charging with grid constraints are carried out in [9].
Opportunities and difficulties in achieving the bidirectional
power flow between grid and vehicle have been discussed in
the [10]. The smart charging, battery technologies, standards,
and infrastructure for the successful V2G operation have
been addressed in the [11]. It also gives information on the
communication and control between the grid operator and the
vehicles. Detailed research has been carried out to measure
the energy losses of a grid-integrated vehicle system in [12].
The different charging standards for implementing V2G and
dynamic charging, using the CCS combo and Chademo for
different EVs has been discussed in the [13]. The dynamic
EV charging on the basis of the residential load and the solar
PV generation can be done with the help of the smart charger Fig. 2: Circuit configuration for V2G-bidirectional charger
developed in [15], in collaboration by Cohere. supported with a three-phase grid
This research describes the architecture of the system, its
design consideration and necessity experiments results of the
EV battery integration with the grid and power converters ancillary services is known as the V2G regulation. The grid-
for the V2G of electric/hybrid vehicle applications. The dis- connected EV with power electronics circuitry is shown in Fig.
charging characteristic of the battery has been analyzed with 2. It incorporates the power electronics converter to control
some figures. The power converter and control topologies for the power flow, filters to minimize the harmonic distortion of
bidirectional charger have been modelled and simulated with current components, and the control strategies. EV battery is
the help of a real-time environment in OPAL-RT. The proposed interfaced with the grid using a DC-DC bidirectional converter
control method will be decided the bidirectional power flow and the DC-AC voltage source converter. The DC link voltage
capability and operate with the ambition of the vehicle owner. is required to obtain the voltage calculated from (8). Hence,
the DC-DC bidirectional converter steps down the voltage in
charging mode and increases in the discharging mode of the
II. A RCHITECTURE OF V EHICLE - TO -G RID battery and the dc-link voltage maintain constant, which is
An EV has lots of benefits, such as increasing charging necessary to equal magnitude with the grid voltage during
efficiency, high quality performance, portable energy storage V2G mode of operation.
device, lower ongoing cost, convenient as battery replacement
expense, less cost on mechanical parts, enormous safety,
III. D ISCHARGING C HARACTERISTICS OF BATTERY
reducing reliance on oil and results in lower carbon emissions.
Vehicle-to-grid has a technically special advantage of EV. The
following Fig. 1 presents the schematic of the V2G concept
with a lithium-ion battery of 19.2 kWh.

(a)
Fig. 1: System architecture of the V2G concept

This paper considers two significant aspects that are re-

quired to implement the theory of Vehicle-to-grid: 1) the first
one is converter topology used to transmit the electrical power,
to and from the vehicle as presented in Fig. 2, 2) The second
is the controller circuit mentioned in the section-IV, which
helps control the power flow of energy transmission from the
battery. To implement this in the EVs, need a battery concept, (b)
power electronics interface such as bidirectional converters, Fig. 3: Battery discharging characteristic: a) Nominal current
filter for harmonics, etc. [3]. A V2G application of an EV gives discharging characteristic, b) Discharging characteristic at dif-
several features including Active power regulation, revenue ferent C-rates
generation, reduced CO2 emissions, filtering harmonics, load
balance, reduce the utility operating cost, peak load saving,
Fig. 3 shows the behaviour of the battery voltage corre-
etc.
sponding to the different discharge rates. From Fig. 3b it can
Most of the time, EV remains in static mode, we can utilize be inferred that there is a reduction in the battery voltage with
this battery for feeding the power into the grid whenever the the increased discharge currents. Battery charge and discharge
tariff is high. This concept of utilizing the battery power for the capacities are always lying between upper and lower cut-off

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voltages. It can be seen by the nominal voltage region in Fig.
3a.
The battery characteristics curve is shown in Fig. 3. It
can be concluded that the battery operates in three regions.
The first region is the exponential voltage drop and its width
depends on the battery types.The second region is the voltage
drop of the battery due to the extraction of charge until the
voltage achieves the nominal value. The third region is the full
discharge of the battery and depicts the rapid drop in voltage.
Battery discharging at the 2 C rate, can discharge in around
half an hour, while at the 0.5 C rate, it can discharge for two
hours. A higher C rate leads to higher energy losses due to
the internal resistance of a battery. During acceleration and the
hill-climbing, an EV battery has to deliver higher C current.
IV. C ONTROL S TRATEGY
A. Methodology : DC-DC Bidirectional Converter Control
Fig. 4: Control Methodology of DC-DC converter
As discussed in Section-II, The DC-DC bidirectional con-
verter operates in such a way that DC link voltage is kept
constant and maintains the desired current flow, which is
controlled by voltage source converter (VSC). The DC-DC
bidirectional converter control is demonstrated in Fig. 4. It
has two closed-loop paths of dc-link voltage and battery
current. The converter observes the dc-link voltage and battery
current using appropriate sensors and compare them with the
reference value and accordingly, it regulates the duty cycle of
the DC-DC bidirectional converter produced by well-known
technique the sinusoidal pulse width modulation (SPWM) with
a frequency of 5 kHz. Using a PI controller, the outer control
loop adjusts the DC link voltage constant, and the battery
current is controlled by using an inner PI controller to enhance
dynamic performance. The required DC link voltage depends
on the line-to-line voltage of the grid, which can calculate
from (8).
B. Methodology : Battery Power Flow Control
The synchronous reference frame (SRF) concept is imple-
mented here to control three-phase three-leg Voltage Source
Converter (VSC). Park transformation is used for converting
the three-phase time domain component in abc reference
frame into the synchronously rotating dq0 frame. The d-q
frame has direct, quadrature, and the zero axis component but
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Fig. 5: Control Methodology of DC-AC bidirectional converter
zero axis component is neglected due to its zero value. The
transformation from the synchronously rotating d-q reference
frame to the three-phase time domain component abc is the
inverse of park transformation. The following equations show
the park and inverse park transformation. By using park
transformation, three-phase(abc) PCC currents are converted
into the dq0 currents.
⎡ ⎤ ⎡ 1
⎤⎡ ⎤
iLd 2 cos θ − sin θ 2 iLa
⎣iLq ⎦ = ⎣cos (θ − 2π/3) − sin (θ − 2π/3) 1 ⎦ ⎣ iLb ⎦
3 2
1
iL0 cos (θ + 2π/3) sin (θ + 2π/3) 2
iLc
(1)
The DC bus voltage, PCC voltage, and load current are used
as the feedback signal for the controller, as shown in Fig. 5.
The d -axis current containing the two components;
1) Fundamental active current component (id )
2) Oscillating active current component (idl )
iLd = id + idl (2)
Similarly q-axis current containing the two components.
1) Fundamental reactive current component (iq )
2) Oscillating reactive current component (iql )
iLq = iq + iql (3)
As shown in Fig. 5, three-Phase phase-locked loop (PLL) is
used continuously to synchronize the grid voltage frequency
[16]. It is used to detect if there is any mismatch in the
grid interfacing converter and the grid frequency, as it can
lead to the large circulating current in the grid interfacing
converter and damage the power electronics components. The
PLL tracked frequency is used to regulate the frequency of the
grid interfacing converter by controlling switching pulses.
The Id and Iq consist of the fundamental and harmonic
components. Synchronous reference frame extracts useful DC
quantities by a low pass filter (LPF), as given in Fig. 5.
The LPF is used after the park transformation to extract the
DC component of ILd and ILq , in this way the harmonics
components are separated from the ILd and ILq . The reference
currents (id ∗ ,iq ∗ ) are obtained by adding the active power
component and the current loss component (iloss ) where
current (iloss ) is inferred from the desired current flow of the
battery.
The current should be in phase with the PCC voltage,
and the zero sequence component of the current should be
zero. The inverse park transformation is shown in (4) where
quadrature component of source current should be zero as the
reactive component of current must be zero, while isa ∗ , isb ∗ ,
and isc ∗ are the reference currents.
⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤⎡
isa∗ cos θ sin θ 1 isd∗
2
⎣ isb∗ ⎦ = ⎣cos (θ − 2π/3) sin (θ − 2π/3) 1⎦ ⎣isq∗ ⎦
3 hysteresis band control, reference wave has an upper band
isc∗ cos (θ + 2π/3) sin (θ + 2π/3) 1 is0∗
id∗ = id + iloss
The PI controller is used for maintaining the reference
voltage at the PCC terminal voltage to achieve zero voltage
regulation (ZVR). Its output is assumed as the reactive current
component of the current iqr , and iq ∗ is obtained by the
difference of the quadrature axis component of the current iqr
and the iq . To achieve the ZVR mode of VSC, supply must
deliver the reference current id ∗ and the iq ∗ .
The amplitude of three-phase voltages at PCC calculated
by,
 
Vs = 2/3 (Va2 + Vb2 + Vc2 ) (6)
iq ∗ = iqr − iq
The amplitude of voltages at PCC is computed from the
Va , Vb , and Vc as per (6) where it is subtracted from the
peak amplitude of line to line voltage and supplied to the
PI controller to obtain the reactive current component. The
reference quadrature axis current is calculated as per (7). By
using inverse Park transformation, three-phase supply current
is obtained from the i∗d as in (5), i∗q as in (7) and i∗0 is set as
zero.
C. Hysteresis Band Control
Fig. 6: Hysteresis current control technique
For the three-phase VSC, the PWM generation from the
reference currents influences the entire control structure. There
are numerous methods available for it, such as Hysteresis
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current control, PWM control, predictive control, linear pro-
portional integration method. Hysteresis current controller or
bang-bang control is utilized here, as the controller controls
each phase independently, and generates PWM switching
pulses for the VSC. It uses the bang-bang instantaneous
⎤
control technique, in which compensation current is compared
with the reference current within a specified band. In the
(4) and a lower band. The actual current lies in this entire band.
V. R ESULTS
(5)
The performance of the power electronics control strategy,
as mentioned earlier, is verified by simulating the complete
system in the real-time environment of OPAL-RT with use
of MATLAB/Simulink. A Lithium-ion battery with a nominal
voltage of 384 V, DC voltage range 336-432 V, and a nominal
capacity of 50 Ah has used in the simulation. For the inte-
gration of three-phase grid to VSC, The DC link voltage is
calculated from the (8) that is maintained to 700 V for the
reliable operation, where m is defined as a modulation index.
[17] For the transient response of the bidirectional charger,
all outcomes have been set to 5 seconds and described as per
Table I by providing the different C-rates as a reference value.
√
2 2
(7) VDC = √ Vline (8)
3m
TABLE I: Battery Current References
Time (s) Battery State Battery Current (A)
0-1 Discharge at 1 C rate 50 A
1 - 1.5 Idle 0A
1.5 - 2.5 Charge at 0.5 C rate -25 A
2.5 - 4 Discharge at 0.5 C rate 25 A
4-5 Idle 0A
Fig. 7 shows the EV power available on the grid side.
Positive values represent discharging of an EV battery, while
negative values of the current represent the charging.
Fig. 7: Active power dispatch to grid
The battery parameters SOC, current and voltage of an EV
battery on the DC side are depicted in Fig. 8 as it is showing
the battery behaviour as per given commands. The change
in the SOC and voltage of the battery is followed as per
the different C rates of current given as the inputs from the
Table I. It can also be shown that while battery is operating in
G2V mode, the voltage is marginally diminished and increases
whereas battery is running in the V2G mode.
(a)
(b)
(c)
Fig. 8: Battery Parameters: a) State of Charge b) Battery input
current, and c) Battery input voltage
Fig. 9: Effect of AC current change on the PCC
The RMS value of the current achieving at the PCC for
one phase is shown in Fig. 9. It is represented the current by
giving the real input commands to the controller as depicted
in Fig. 5. The PCC voltages and currents waveforms are as
shown in Fig. 10 for the duration of 1C battery discharge
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current that’s why the all three-phase currents and voltages
are settled in the same phase and the charging of the battery
with different C-rates, each phase voltages will be reversed
with their respective currents. These waveforms also indicate
that this controller is working in the unity power factor mode
with acceptable harmonic losses as achieved 4.56% THD.
(a)
(b)
Fig. 10: Grid parameters achieved at the AC side of VSC: a)
Voltages b) Currents
VI. C ONCLUSION
A bidirectional V2G charger suitable for EV applications
has been presented in this article. The adopted control strategy
is simple to implement, and it also delivers promising results.
From the results obtained, it is clear that the controller’s
response is good enough in terms of transient and steady-state
response. Further, as the results are obtained on a real-time
simulator, it can be said that the control strategy is robust
enough, and it can work on actual systems with a reasonable
deviation. The future scope of this work can be on deploying
the proposed charger on a prosumer driven peer to peer energy
trading.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The research work is funded by the Dept. of Science
and Technology (DST), Govt. of India, under the Grant
DST/CERI/MI/SG/2017/084.
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