Abstract:

There is an evolving paradigm shift in transportation industry towards electrified vehicles, which are more environmental friendly, reliable, safer and smarter. Electric vehicles (EVs) are seen as next generation transportation for sustainable living and low carbon mobility. The tribulations associated with the presently available plugin or conductive chargers necessitate the pursuit of wireless power transfer technology for EV charging which would bring about the ultimate convenience of owning an EV. The wireless power transfer technology is a convenient, ‘handfree’, ‘no touch’, and ‘park and charge’ charging system In spite of its advantages, however, this technology has not been widely adopted in transportation. This delay may be because the technology remains quite expensive and less efficient than other available technologies. Continued effort and innovation in wireless power transfer for EV charging opens an era of magnetic resonance (so called resonant inductive coupling) based WPT system for EV charging. The innovative work carried out in the thesis addresses the fundamental hurdles to the widespread usage of wireless charging, the big concern of power transfer efficiency of resonant inductive link under non-ideal practical EV charging conditions that holds the promise for future EVs. In-depth analysis, equivalent circuit models, electromagnetic simulations and experimental investigations are performed, and authenticate guidelines have been provided in order to build up a suitable and efficient resonant inductive coupling based wireless power transfer system for EV charging under various usage scenarios. An automatic frequency tuned system with an adaptive matching circuit has been proposed and successfully demonstrated to maintain the optimum power transfer efficiency without imposing most constraints on the coil design, physical gap maintenance between the coils, design of the vehicles, on-vehicle charging system and charging infrastructure. By executing the developed and optimized resonant inductively coupled wireless power transfer system the practical battery charging has been fruitfully demonstrated. It illuminates a prototype of unidirectional off-board isolated resonant inductive battery charging system by elucidating the deep insights for designing an efficient resonance based wireless charging system which plays an important role in the development and widespread adoption of EV.