This paper is aimed to analyze design criteria, setting up, control strategies and experimental tests related
to a power configuration of DC micro-grid for fast charging of full electric and plug in hybrid vehicles. The
proposed DC fast charging architecture is derived by an analysis comparing the main characteristics of
well known architectures, mainly based on AC and DC bus, taking also into account the integration of
renewable energy sources (RESs) with stationary energy storage systems and fleets of road electric/hybrid
vehicles. On the base of the proposed architecture a laboratory prototype of charging station
has been realized by means of a 20 kW AC/DC bidirectional grid tie converter interconnected with two
different power DC/DC converters of similar rated power. In this micro-grid architecture the AC/DC converter
realizes a conversion stage at 790 V DC, whereas other two converters allow either the electric
vehicle battery packs to be charged or an energy storage buffer to save electric energy and support the
main grid during the fast charging operations. The laboratory tests described in this paper are mainly
devoted to characterize the laboratory demonstrator, in different operative conditions, such as
vehicle-to-grid (V2G), charging/discharging operations of different types of storage systems and fast
charging operations of road electric vehicles. Then the study of the proposed power conversion architecture
is focused on the evaluation of charging/discharging power, efficiency, energy flux management and
its impact on the main grid. In addition proper control strategies are evaluated and implemented, allowing
the proposed architecture to follow the required operations. The obtained experimental results
demonstrate real advantages in terms of charging times and power requirements from the main grid,when adopting DC buffer architecture for fast charging operations. Finally, these results support the identification
of a knowledge base, useful to evaluate energy management and control strategies to be
adopted for DC charging stations and each one of their power converters in a smart grid scenario with
distributed generation systems.