A Buck-Boost Type Charger with a Switched Capacitor Circuit

In this paper, a buck-boost type battery charger is developed for charging battery set with a lower voltage. This battery charger is configured by a rectifier circuit, an integrated boost/buck power converter and a switched capacitors circuit. A boost power converter and a buck power converter sharing a common power electronic switch are integrated to form the integrated boost/buck power converter. By controlling the common power electronic switch, the battery charger performs a hybrid constant-current/constant-voltage charging method and gets a high input power factor. Accordingly, both the power circuit and the control circuit of the developed battery charger are simplified. The switched capacitors circuit is applied to be the output of the boost converter and the input of the buck converter. The switched capacitors circuit can change its voltage according to the utility voltage so as to reduce the step-up voltage gain of the boost converter when the utility voltage is small. Hence, the power efficiency of a buck-boost type battery charger can be improved. Moreover, the step-down voltage gain of the buck power converter is reduced to increase the controllable range of the duty ratio for the common power electronic switch. A prototype is developed and tested to verify the performance of the proposed battery charger.