This paper comprehensively reviews the current status of multidisciplinary technologies in electric vehicles. Because the electric vehicle market will expand dramatically in the coming few years, research accomplishments in power electronics technology for electric vehicles will be highly attractive. Challenges in power electronics technology for driving electric vehicles, charging batteries, and circuit topologies are being explored. This paper aims primarily to address the practical issues of the future electric vehicles and help researchers obtain an overview of the latest techniques in electric vehicles, focusing on power electronics-based solutions for both current and future electric vehicle technologies. In this work, different medium-and high-voltage DC-AC inverter topologies are investigated and compared in terms of power losses and component requirements. Recent research on electric vehicle power converters is also discussed, with highlighting on soft-switching and multilevel inverters for electric vehicle motor drives. In this paper, a methodical overview and general classification of DC-AC power converters are presented. In specific topologies, drawbacks such as voltage stresses on active switches and control complications may occur, which can make them difficult for immediate commercialization. However, various modified circuit topologies have been recommended to overcome these drawbacks and enhance the system performance.

The Static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) is a renowned FACTS (flexible alternating current transmission system) device used in power grids to cope with protean conditions. This article provides a comprehensive bibliographic review of various aspects of STATCOM developed over the last 16 years. The paper includes a detailed study presenting different models, test systems, and results of various researches. The study covers the modelling, control technology, stability, optimal location, applications, and installation of STATCOM. The modelling of STATCOM is diverse and include various models such as voltage source converters, software-based models, load flow models, pulse width modulation, and modular multilevel converters. The control technology includes a PI/PID controller, fuzzy-based, feedback controller, model predictive controller, sliding mode controller, and miscellaneous controller based on different schemes, algorithms, and controllers. In studying the stability analysis, all stability aspects such as steady-state stability, dynamic stability, and transient stability are considered for the stability analysis. The genetic algorithm, heuristic algorithm, probabilistic technique and branch and bound approach are mainly used for the optimal placement of STATCOM as described in the available research paper. Various applications of STATCOM in power system are identified such as optimal power flow, voltage stability, voltage fluctuation mitigation, fault analysis and total harmonic distortion. This paper, also mentions the current installation of STATCOM is also mentioned with their different locations such as China (2018), and Canada (2019). The current functions of STATCOM still have many limitations. So there is still a lot of room for improvement. This paper will help the researcher finding the reference of a particular topic of interest in different aspects of STATCOM. The finding of different sections of the paper can help the researchers to develop new ideas and work on different prospective of the device.

In this paper, a new multi-port DC-DC power converter used to deal with the intermittent nature and slow response in renewable energy applications is proposed. The proposed converter integrates a DC-DC converter and a DC-AC inverter, and the proposed circuit integrates various renewable energy sources in addition to the energy storage unit. By combining renewable energy sources with a statistical trend to offset each other, the impact of the intermittency can be considerably minimized. This combination increases the overall system reliability and usability. Moreover, integrating such systems with energy storage systems can overcome the slow response issue of renewable sources. It can provide the additional energy required by the load or absorb the extra energy provided by the power sources, which greatly improves the dynamics of the overall system. The proposed converter can reduce the system cost and size and improve the efficiency and reliability. The operation principle is studied in detail, and the design considerations are provided. The proposed architecture and its control strategy were analyzed and studied using the Simulink/MATLAB environment. Finally, the feasibility of the proper operation of the studied converter was experimentally verified based on the results of experimental studies conducted on a 300 W prototype implemented in a laboratory.

The disadvantage of photovoltaic (PV) power generation is that output power decreases due to the presence of clouds or shade. Moreover, it can only be used when the sun is shining. Consequently, there is a need for further active research into the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique, which can maximize the power of solar cells. When the solar cell array is partially shaded due to the influence of clouds or buildings, the solar cell characteristic has a number of local maximum power points (LMPPs). Conventional MPPT techniques do not follow the actual maximum power point, namely, the global maximum power point (GMPP), but stay in the LMPP. Therefore, an analysis of the occurrence of multiple LMPPs due to partial shading, as well as a study on the MPPT technique that can trace GMPP, is needed. In order to overcome this obstacle, the grey wolf optimization (GWO) method is proposed in order to track the global maximum power point and to maximize the energy extraction of the PV system. In addition, opposition-based learning is integrated with the GWO to accelerate the MPPT search process and to reduce convergence time. Simultaneously, the DC link voltage is controlled to reduce sudden variations in voltage in the event of transients of solar radiation and/or temperature. Experimental tests are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed MPPT method during uniform irradiance and partial shading conditions. The proposed method is compared with the perturbation and observation method.

In this paper, the optimal designing of passive power filter (PPF) is formulated as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem under several constraints of system's performance indices (PIs) such as individual as well as total harmonic distortion (THD) in the line current and the point of common coupling's (PCC) voltage, distribution line's ampacity under harmonic currents overloading, steady-state voltage profile, load power factor (PF) and a few associated with the filter itself. The optimal design parameters of a third-order damped filter are simultaneously determined for achieving maximum PF at the PCC while keeping system's other indices such as total demand distortion (TDD) in the line current, total voltage harmonic distortion (TVHD) at the PCC and total filter cost (FC) incurred at a minimum by obtaining a best-compromised solution using the newly proposed multi-objective Pareto-based firefly algorithm (pb-MOFA). A novel MOO approach inspired by the modified firefly algorithm and Pareto front is established in order to deal with PPF design problems. The extension of MOFA is considered for producing the Pareto optimal front and various conclusions are drawn by analysing the trade-offs among the objectives. The efficiency and accuracy of the proposed pb-MOFA, in solving the concerned MOO problem, is validated by comparing an obtained solution and three computed PIs viz. convergence metric (CM), generational distance (GD) and diversity metric (DM) with those obtained from popular multi-objective Pareto-based PSO (pb-MOPSO), non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) and recently introduced multi-objective slime mould algorithm (MOSMA). The need for true Pareto front (TPF) is served by the one obtained by Monte Carlo method. At last, the impacts of different background voltage distortion (BVD) levels and load-side's nonlinearity levels (NLLs) on filter performance are analysed.

The penetration of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) has increased in the transportation sector in the last few years and it has increased the uncertain load in the power sector. In order to analyze the impact on the power grid and plan infrastructure, modeling of PEV load profiles is required. Determining realistic PEV load profiles is challenging due to the involvement of serval uncertainties and complex interdependencies among different factors and to date, there are no benchmark load profiles of PEVs. In this paper, realistic and ready-to-use load profiles for PEVs are developed by considering vehicle mobility, charging infrastructure, and the market share of PEVs. Firstly, the U.S. National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) data is filtered to remove vehicles with unrealistic, duplicate, and missing data. Secondly, a set of relevant parameters is extracted to estimate different features of PEVs, such as arrival time, departure time, and daily mileage. Then, all the commercially available PEVs are grouped into four clusters using the K-means algorithm. Finally, the per unit (per PEV) load profiles are estimated using the information of the available PEVs in the market, charging levels in the residential sector, and features extracted in the previous step. A large set of scenarios are considered for each PEV cluster in determining the load profiles. The pre-unit profiles estimated in this study are ready-to-use for researchers and planners in the PEV industry and are realistic due to consideration of different relevant factors and a large traveling database of vehicles. The developed per-unit load profiles are used to estimate and analyze the PEV load profiles of the top four countries with the highest penetration percentage of PEVs.