Emerging Technologies in Electric Vehicle Engineering: Battery Chargers, Electric Drives, and Smart Grid Services

Dear Colleagues,

The Guest Editors invite submissions for a Special Issue of the MDPI Electronics journal entitled “Emerging Technologies in Electric Vehicle Engineering: Battery Chargers, Electric Drives, and Smart Grid Services.”

The electric vehicle (EV) is recognized to be part of the expected strategic response against the global warming issue. Government, authorities, and automotive players have already started the so-called green shift, in which EVs are one of the most crucial elements. Green mobility is entering a more mature scenario where most of the strengths and weaknesses of conventional electric mobility technology have already been analyzed, exploited, and improved. New emerging technologies, which were unknown only a few years ago, are starting to be recognized as good candidates for mainstream adoption in the coming decades.

Novel power converter charging topologies dealing with the increasing AC and DC fast charging demand capable of guaranteeing bidirectional power flows are one of the most promising research fields. Unconventional electric drive structures able to provide torque vectoring, size, weight, and efficiency optimization are an already recognized hot topic. Finally, the unexploited capability of EV to actively contribute with ancillary smart grid services into power systems is expected to be a key player in the transition toward a fully/strongly dominated renewable energies scenario.

Electric vehicle engineering represents a broad study field with main topics such as smart battery packs, battery management systems, wide-bandgap power components, cockpit electromagnetic compatibility, storage technology, intelligent control systems, and many others, and all of them are an acknowledged part of the EV research trend today.

This Special Issue aims to consolidate knowledge of cutting-edge emerging technologies for electric vehicle engineering. Hence, scholars, academic scientists, researchers, Ph.D. students, and professional groups are invited to submit original contributions supported by experimental validation and/or review papers.

The topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Power electronics:
  • Power electronics for battery balancing and energy storage devices coupling;
  • Topology standardization and converters modularity for low cost charging power scaling and fault-tolerant systems;
  • New battery charger technologies for onboard and offboard chargers such as interleaved, multilevel, bidirectional, and resonant converters, for both AC and DC fast charging;
  • Novel driving strategies and power switch technologies such as SiC- and GaN-based systems;
  • EV charging utilizing wireless power transfer (WPT) for both light and heavy vehicles;
• Energy storage and onboard systems:
  • Advancements in energy storage technologies, including alternative hybrid/mixed battery pack employing ultracapacitors, fuel cells, and second life components;
  • Smart battery packs and battery management systems for cells-level monitoring, active balancing, and state of charge (SoC), state of health (SoH), and temperature advanced identification/estimation techniques;
  • EV cockpit electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and power quality management in charging and driving operations;
  • Control techniques based on microcontrollers, DSPs, and FPGAs architectures;
• Electric drives:
  • Traction converter and electric machines beyond the state-of-the-art with advanced field/torque control for standard three-phase or multiphase structures;
  • Filtering, coupling, and galvanic isolation during charging operations through electric machine windings;
  • Multimotor architectures for advanced kinetic energy recovery, torque vectoring, performance, and efficiency optimization;
  • Traction and charging power converters integration for weight, cost, and size optimization;
• Smart grid services:
  • Fleet aggregation and charging planning for exploiting renewable energy sources and profit maximization in high EV penetration scenarios;
  • Ancillary services, such as Vehicle to Grid (V2G), Vehicle for Grid (V4G), Vehicle to Home (V2H), Vehicle to Building (V2B), Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V), and all the possible Vehicle to Anything (V2X) systems;
  • Smart mobility integration in smart cities for charging station locations, demand response, and system-level optimization.

Dr. Mattia Ricco
Dr. Jelena Loncarski
Dr. Riccardo Mandrioli
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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