Abstract

The growing concerns about climate change that has already affected the environment negatively in many ways call for immediate actions to keep global warming below the limit set out in the Paris agreement of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. The energy and transportation sectors are considered the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. Therefore, the electrification of these sectors and making them environmentally friendly should be prioritized. Internal combustion engine vehicles account for the majority of CO2 emissions; hence, replacing them with Electric Vehicles (EV) has the highest potential to slow down global warming. However, they must be charged from renewable sources such as Photovoltaic (PV) to eliminate the indirect CO2 emissions, so EVs become environmentally friendly in the true sense. To increase the rate of PVs and EVs penetration into the grid, energy storage (ES) should be added to the PV system to overcome its intermittency nature and to the EV charging stations to reduce their negative impacts on the electric grid. In this dissertation, novel multiport multilevel converters that facilitate the integration of ES with the PV systems and EV charging stations and fit various applications seamlessly and efficiently are designed, developed, and verified using the state-of-the-art low voltage Gallium Nitride (GaN) power semiconductor devices. These developed multiport multilevel converters have achieved very high efficiency, high power density, low harmonic distortion, light weight, and compact size. They facilitate interfacing multiple sources and loads in a single unit. They ease adding ES to the PV system. Moreover, they facilitate interfacing the Grid, the PV, the EV, and the ES locally at the charging stations. In addition, these multiport multilevel converters can be employed in several other applications, such as ES + PV systems for standalone AC load and uninterrupted power supply designs.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2023

Semester

Spring

Advisor

Batarseh, Issa

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Degree Program

Electrical Engineering

Identifier

CFE0009869; DP0028141

URL

https://purls.library.ucf.edu/go/DP0028141

Language

English

Release Date

November 2026

Length of Campus-only Access

3 years

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Campus-only Access)

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Restricted to the UCF community until November 2026; it will then be open access.

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