CAREER: Novel Direct Current Power Distribution for Large-scale Electrified Transportation Charging

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This NSF CAREER project aims to make fundamental advances and create new scientific knowledge in direct current power distribution (DCPD) and enable transformative impact on efficient, reliable, and low-cost large-scale electric vehicle (EV) charging. The project will bring transformative change to electrified transportation, e-mobility, goals for net-zero emissions, and associated societal impact. The intellectual merits of the project include (1) introducing a novel solution for distributing power to chargers for large-scale EV charging, (2) advancing knowledge in modeling and control for a family of ac-dc architectures, (3) introducing architectures for renewable energy integration, (4) creating scientific findings for modular system design and control, (5) producing new knowledge for power converter electro-thermal analysis, (6) advancing the field of dynamic modeling, stability analysis, operation, and protection of DCPD, and (7) creating a new scalable and transferable hardware platform for experimental evaluation and validation. The broader impacts of the project include (1) facilitating widespread EV adoption by enabling effective power distribution for large-scale EV charging and training the diverse engineering workforce necessary to carry the technologies forward to widespread adoption in society, (2) improved air quality, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and reduced cost to move people and goods, (3) increasing the interest of women and underrepresented minority groups in an engineering career, and in pursuing higher education in engineering.The CAREER plan goal is to make fundamental advances and create new scientific knowledge in direct current power distribution architectures, power converter design techniques, power converter and system modeling, and novel electro-thermal analysis, collectively enabling transformative impact on efficient, reliable, and low-cost large-scale EV charging. This will be achieved by proposing a novel DCPD with charging units connected in series through a trunk cable powered by a grid-tied ac-dc current source to address the significant fundamental problem of how to distribute power to the chargers for large-scale EV charging. The education and research of the program are woven together to increase diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in engineering and train the next generation of engineers to be well-prepared for the transformation in electrified transportation in the U.S.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.