“The Depth with which you master the basics influences how well you understand everything you learn after that” - Edward B. Burger
India is currently entering the era of electric vehicles. There has been a buzz about this industry everywhere in the past 2-3 years. I am sure that you have been reading a lot about charging stations, infrastructure, protocols, etc in recent times. It would have given you a curiosity of knowing the hardware inside it. Kazam as a leading charging solution provider in the market will take you through the basics of an AC charging station. Although every charging network provider has different features inbuilt into their chargers, there are 4 significant subsystems that remain common across all of them.
The input given to the charging stations is ac power supply. The electronic circuits inside the charging station operate with a dc power. Hence initially the input supply is converted from ac to dc using ac to dc converter. This converter is selected based on the factors like input voltage range, desired output voltage, desired output current, efficiency,space,cost etc. Initially, these converters are huge in size and less efficient. Over time due to significant breakthroughs in the electronics industry, the size of the converters has reduced a lot and their efficiency has improved. Apart from ac to dc conversion, there would be one more power conversion subsystem. That is the dc-dc subsystem. There would be multiple internal circuits in the hardware of the charging station which operate at different voltage and current. To facilitate dc conversion from one power level to other , dc-dc converters are used.
Most of the charging stations are installed in public areas like restaurants, malls, parking lots, RWAs, etc. They charge the consumers either on an hourly basis or a subscription basis etc. But for calculating the cost, power consumption has to be measured accurately. This is one of the most important subsystems of a charging station. It consists of sensors and an integrated circuit to measure the voltage, and current with the help of which it measures the power that is being consumed by the vehicle in a particular charging session.
When a user is riding his electric vehicle and finds that the battery percentage is low, he has to locate the nearest possible charging station. Since mobile has become an inevitable part of our day to day life the best possible way to do this is through his mobile application. This helps both the host and the user. Communication between the mobile interface and the charger is done by IOT. Kazam gives the customers to choose their preferable type over various modes of communication. A controller is present in every charging station to facilitate the control of features of the chargers, data transfer , store the data etc.
Safety has to be the primary factor before designing a product. Charging stations are susceptible to various incidents that might affect the user or the vehicle. Safety subsystem plays a crucial role in every charging station. Surges in the input side , over voltage , poor quality of earthing are some of the common possibilities of fail cases in charging station. This subsystem uses miniature circuit breakers (MCB) , Fuses , Surge protectors , Residual current detectors to prevent the risks to the users and chargers.
Apart from the above-listed subsystems, there is an additional subsystem that includes various features to enhance the process of charging an electric vehicle. This is an optional one and the features differ from one charging manufacturer to another. In Kazam there are unique features like earth fault protection, theft protection, ingress protection, led indication for providing a visual status update of the charging stations to the customers, scheduling of charging in prior, etc. If you like to know more about our products, feel free to visit Kazam 3.3 Mini
