Solar Charging Station for Electric Vehicles
Driss Oulad-abbou*, Said Doubabi
Department of Applied Physics
Cadi Ayyad University
Marrakech, Morocco
driss.ouladabbou@gmail.com, s.doubabi@uca.ma
Abstract—There are many topologies of solar charging station for
electric vehicles, using DC or AC current to charge, which
increases the uses of DC-DC and DC-AC converters. The main
idea of this article is to reduce the number of DC-DC converters
in an AC charging station. In the light of this vision, this work
proposes a topology with their managing unit. To this end, the
operating characteristics and performance of this topology are
analyzed and tested using PSIM software.
Keywords— electric vehicles; stand-alone solar charging
station, simulation.
I. INTRODUCTION
Solar energy become among the most challenging energy
sources. In fact, a lot of domestic, industrial or commercial
applications use solar energy.
Moreover, sustainable energy is a key source to meet
reduction of carbon emissions. On the contrary, standard
vehicles are a big source of pollution, which makes the use of
electric vehicles (EVs) a promising solution. However, because
of range constraint and batteries cost, EVs have not developed
too much so far. Hence, the significant challenge is to build
hybrid vehicles or electrical vehicles, which can run on onboard
batteries, for considerable distance, while keeping small, the
cost of vehicle storage battery [2].
Nevertheless, in the city, the mean distance range is about
25-30 Km, which meet a reasonable EV range.
In Morocco, and specially Marrakech, motorcycles and
scooters are widely used for transportation. In addition, the use
of electric bikes is becoming more and more popular, which is
reflected by the increased number of electric bikes and electric
tricycles marketed in recent years.
For many reasons taking into account environmental and
cost considerations, using renewable energy sources such as
solar energy is preferable to charge plug-in electric vehicles [1].
Moreover, solar energy is widely available in Morocco, and
Marrakech in particular, as shown in figure 1. Hence, it is
preferable to use solar energy to charge these electric bikes,
which is the basic idea of this work. It consists to use solar
energy for charging e-bikes, in the light of this idea; we suggest
a standalone solar charging station, for electric bikes.
The charge of an electric drive vehicles is generally done at
three voltage and current levels: AC level 1 requires 8 to 14
hours to fully charge a vehicle, depending on the EV, battery,
and charging control. AC level 2 requires 4 to 6 hours to fully
This work was supported by the institute of research on solar energy and
new energies: IRESEN-project VERES.
Ahmed RACHID
Laboratoire des Technologies Innovantes
University of Picardie Jules Verne
Amiens, France
rachid@u-picardie.fr
charge a vehicle and Level 3 DC charging for fast charging of
EVs in minutes instead of hours [3].
In [1] the authors propose an AC charging station with
second life Li-Ion battery, integrating solar PV, wind energy.
This station is grid connected which allows the export or
import energy depending on the utilization.
The authors in [2][4] proposes a control strategy of a multi-
port, grid connected, direct DC PV charging station was
proposed, the source of energy here can be either PV panels or
AC grid, the transfer of energy from AC grid is bidirectional,
hence, PV energy can be injected on AC grid. These two
topologies use many converters, which reduce efficiency.
In [5] a charging strategies is proposed to minimize the
energy cost, the charging time is divided into intervals to
minimize the peak consumption of a fleet of EVs during day
time. The charging station in this case is grid connected; in
addition, the topology was not given.
The effect of fast charging EVs on the AC grid was
investigated in [8]; the charging station in [8] is a DC fast
charging, and only the grid is used as energy source. The
energy source is not renewable and the efficiency is decreased
by using two converters.
Four possible architectures for a solar EV charger are
proposed and compared in [9], these configurations are also
grid connected, two possible choices for interconnection to the
AC grid: AC inter-connection or DC inter-connection. The
efficiency is decreased by the use of several DC-DC and DC-
AC converters.
Moroccan irradiance card [7].
 In this work, we propose a standalone solar AC charging
station, and a managing unit of the flow of energy between PV,
charging station solar batteries and the inverter of an AC stand-
alone, solar charging station as illustrated in figure 2.
This study is done for a 3KW charging station, so it can be
used also for both e-bikes and small vehicles like Renault
Twizy.
This paper is organized into 5 sections. Section II, gives the
configuration and the design consideration of the studied
charging station.
In Section III we propose a control algorithm of the
managing unit of this charging station.
Simulation results are shown in Section IV, followed by the
conclusion and perspectives in section V.
In the following Charging Station Storage Battery is called
CSSB, electric bikes and electric tricycle are called e-bikes and
e-tricycles respectively.
Figure 1. Studied system.
II. CONFIGURATION AND DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS OF THE
CHARGING STATION
The studied system is composed of a PV source, which is
the energy source, an inverter (DC to AC converter) and a
CSSB.
The PV source is composed of 21 PV panels; each one of
them delivers 150 Watts. The configuration of these panels is
illustrated in figure 3; current and voltage of this source are
55.2V and 57.12A respectively. Electrical characteristics of
each panel are depicted in table 1.
The choice of this configuration is justified, firstly to
maximize the output current, secondly to get a sufficient
voltage.
Figure 2. The PV source.
TABLE I. ELECTRICAL CHARACTERISTIC OF EACH PANEL.
Maximum peak current (Imp) 8.16A
Maximum peak voltage (Vmp) 18.4V
Open circuit voltage 22.5A
Short circuit current 8.55A
Maximum power 150W
The role of the managing unit is:
- To ensure a voltage included in the voltage range of the
inverter, which is 41V-57V, the nominal voltage of this inverter
is 48Volts;
- To supply energy from CSSB when the energy supplied by
PV source is not sufficient to satisfy energy demand. As
illustrated in figure 4, the managing unit is composed of a buck
converter, the framed part, used as a battery charger, two
switches I1 and I2, are used to connect CSSB or PV source
respectively; diodes D1 and D2 are used to impose the transfer
of energy to the load. The Zener diode D3, is used for
protection against voltage overshoot, the breakdown voltage of
this diode is equal to 57V, which correspond to the highest
voltage value acceptable by the inverter, which is a 3KW,
220V/50Hz one.
We assume that the onboard chargers of the e-bikes are
supplied with 220V/50Hz and consume from 2.5 to 3A, and
their power varies from 550 Watts to 660 Watts. As mentioned,
the output power of the inverter is 3KW, which allows to charge
from 4-5 e-bikes simultaneously, or one Renault Twizy that
consume about 3KW to be charged.
To simplify this simulation on PSIM, the e-bikes and the
inverter are modeled by a resistive load.
Three scenarios are considered:
 Solar energy is sufficient enough, is this case energy is
sufficient enough to supply both the inverter, and
CSSB.
 Solar energy is sufficient to supply only the inverter;
 Solar energy is not sufficient.
Note that the priority is given to the e-bikes.
The CSSB is supposed equipped with its BMS. The output
of this BMS is the SOC, which allows managing the charging
and discharging of this battery, another input we consider is VP
determines the presence of the vehicle, it’s a binary variable;
VP is equal to 1 (resp. 0) when vehicle is (resp. not) present at
the charging station.
III. THE CONTROL ALGORITHM
To take into account the three scenarios described in the
previous section, the control algorithm must be able to
manage and provide good decisions.
The flowchart of the proposed control algorithm is given in
figure 5. It consists of charging the e-bike when connected, by
the energy supplied by PVs. If this supply is not enough, the
CSSB has to supply the needed difference. However, if e-bikes
are not connected, PV supplies energy to charge the CSSB.
The algorithm starts by reading the binary variable VP,
which indicates the presence of an e-bike. Based on this
variable, two choices are possible:
  When VP is equal to 1 (the e-bikes is connected to In this case all energy extracted from PVs is supplied
the station): to the CSSB.
The priority is charging the e-bikes as said before. The charge of CSSB is done on a three phase’s as
First, I2 is on, then the PV voltage is measured, if the indicated in [6].
voltage belongs to the acceptable range of the inverter,
The reduced cost of lead acid batteries is the main
and the current supplied by PV source is higher than
reason to use them in our application.
45A, then PV source is sufficient to charge the e-bikes.
However if this voltage is lower than 41V, and/or the The 200Ah battery could be discharged until 50% of
current is not sufficient enough, the rest of energy is its capacity, which allow using 100Ah, a capacity able
supplied by CSSB, so the switch I1 is turned on, which to charge one e-bike by CSSB as energy sources.
provides the rest of current demanded by the load
and/or imposes a voltage included in the voltage range
of the inverter (the battery voltage is included in this
voltage range).

Figure 3. The proposed scheme.

Figure 4. Flowchart of the proposed algorithm.

Note that to protect CSSB, the SOC should not be less than
50% i.e. CSSB supplies energy, if their state of charge, SOC is IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
higher than 50%. The operation of this station was tested using PSIM
software, the simulation schematic is given in Figure 4. Six
 When VP is equal to 0 (no e-bikes at the station):
inputs are used to control the entire system: the PV current, the
PV voltage, the output voltage, vehicle presence VP, the state
of charge SOC and finally the input current of CSSB.
However three outputs are used to control, battery charger,
switches I1 and I2. Diodes D1 and D2 are used as blocking
diode.
Simulation results are given in figures 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. The (a)
three charging phases of CSSB are given in figures 6, 7 and 8.
In figure 6 the boost phase is applied by extracting the
maximum power delivered by the PV source, the algorithm
used for extracting maximum power from PV source is the
perturb and observe (P&O) MPPT algorithm .
The absorption phase is illustrated in figure 7 by applying a (b)
charging current equal to 20A.
The last phase, floating one, consists to apply a charging
current inferior than 12A as shown in figure 8.
Figure 7. The floating phase: (a) average value of batterie charging current
(A), (b) SOC and VP.

(a)

(a)

(b)

(b)

Figure 5. The Boost phase: (a) maximum power (watts)delivred by the panel
and instantanuous power (watts) delivred to the battery, (b) SOC (%) and VP .
Figure 8. E-bikes charging when solar energy is sufficient to charge these e-
bikes: (a) PV curent (A), batterie output current (A), output current (A) and
output voltage (V), (b) SOC (%) and VP.

(a) (a)

(b) (b)

Figure 6. The absorption phase: (a) avearage value of batterie chaging

current (A), (b) SOC (%) and VP . Figure 9. E-bikes charging when solar energy is not sufficient to charge the e-
bikes: (a) output current (A), batterie output current (A) and PV output current
(A), (b) SOC (%) and VP.

Figure 9 shows the output current, the output voltage and

the CSSB output current when e-bikes is on the charging
station and energy produced by PV source is sufficient to
charge these e-bikes. It can be seen here that only the PV
source is supplying energy. However, in figure 10 the energy
supplied by PV source is not enough to charge the e-bikes,
therefore, the CSSB supply the rest of energy requested by the
e-bikes.
The operation was tested while the e-bike is disconnected.
Figure 11 illustrate different signals when the load (e-bike) is
disconnected at 0.04s, the output current and voltage becomes
zero, however the power delivered to the battery is changed
from zero to maximum power since the boost phase is applied
to charge the CSSB.
According to the simulation results, it is clear that the
managing unit is working properly. The efficiency is increased;
the cost is reduced and the system becomes not complicated,
because of the elimination of a DC-DC converter.
(a)
(b)
(b)
Figure 10. Different signals when the e-bikes is disconnected: (a) output
current (A), PV current (A) ant output voltage (v), (b) maximum power
delivred by the PV (Watts) and power dilivred to the batterie (Watts), (c)
SOC (%) and VP.
V. CONCLUSION AND FITURE WORKS
This paper has presented a managing unit of a solar
charging station and showed the usefulness of the proposed
scheme. According to the above simulation results, it can be
seen that the managing unit ensures good performance either the
vehicle is present or not. Moreover, this combination of this
unit and the proposed topology proves to have low cost and
simple design which makes the design and sizing easy.
In addition, the control algorithm could be implemented on
a low cost microcontroller.
Our priority for further work is to prove the validity of this
work through experimental tests, and then to test the ability of
this system, to guarantee good performances for multiple
loading terminal
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