Fault Tolerant Boost Converter with Multiple Serial Inputs and Output Voltage Regulation for Vehicle-to-Aid Services

The operation of electric vehicles (EV) is currently being segmented into a scenario of smart grids, including vehicle-to-grid (V2G), vehicle-to-home (V2H), vehicle-to-building (V2B), and vehicle-to-load (V2L), among others. Energy-providing services from EVs for medical/health assistance (human, animal, agronomist, environmental, etc.), including emergency services (patrols, fire trucks, etc.), are named/classified in this article as vehicle-to-aid (V2A), since it is expected that they will require special characteristics. For instance, an EV for V2A services must supply regulated voltage by a power electronic converter, even during possible failures, including short-circuits and damages on its components. In this paper, a new configuration of boost converter is proposed, with unlimited serial inputs (n), and important properties of fault tolerance, even if the power sources are not isolated; this includes robustness against component failures, variations in the parameters and design errors. Analytic, numerical, and experimental results that validate the operation of the proposed configuration against failures and parameter variation are presented. A numerical comparison with series-connected boost converters is also presented, showing best closed loop performance (PI) with n fewer diodes and n fewer capacitors.