Power electronics play a fundamental role for electric transportation, renewable energy conversion and many other industrial applications. They have the ability to help achieve high efficiency and performance in power systems. However, traditional inverters such as voltage source and current source inverters present some limitations. Consequently, many research efforts have been focused on developing new power electronics converters suitable for many applications. Compared with the conventional two-stage inverter, Z-source inverter (ZSI) is a single-stage converter with lower design cost and high efficiency. It is a power electronics circuit of which the function is to convert DC input voltage to a symmetrical AC output voltage of desired magnitude and frequency. Recently, ZSIs have been widely used as a replacement for conventional two-stage inverters in the distributed generation systems. Several modifications have been carried out on ZSI to improve its performance and efficiency. This paper reviews the-state-of-art impedance source inverter main topologies and points out their applications for multisource electric vehicles. A concise review of main existing topologies is presented. The basic structural differences, advantages and limitations of each topology are illustrated. From this state-of-the-art review of impedance source inverters, the embedded quasi-Z-source inverter presents one of the promising architectures which can be used in multisource electric vehicles, with better performance and reliability. The utilization of this new topology will open the door to several development axes, with great impact on electric vehicles (EVs).

In this paper, a battery pack and a supercapacitor bank hybrid energy storage system (HESS) with a new control configuration is proposed for electric vehicles (EVs). A bidirectional quasi-Z-source inverter (Bq-ZSI) and a bidirectional DC-DC converter are used in the powertrain of the EV. The scheme of the control for the proposed HESS Bq-ZSI using finite control set model predictive control (FCS-MPC) is first deduced to enhance the dynamic performance. With the idea of managing battery degradation mitigation, the fractional-order PI (FOPI) controller is then applied and associated with a filtering technique. The Opal-RT-based real-time simulation is next executed to verify the performance and effectiveness of the proposed HESS control strategy. As a result, the proposed HESS Bq-ZSI with this control scheme provides a quick response to the mechanical load and stable DC link voltage under the studied driving cycle. Moreover, the comparative results also show that the proposed HESS Bq-ZSI equipped with the new control configuration enables the reduction of the root-mean-square value, the mean value, and the standard deviation by 57%, 59%, and 27%, respectively, of the battery current compared to the battery-based inverter. Thus, the proposed HESS Bq-ZSI using these types of controllers can help to improve the EV system performance.