Improved Resonant Converter for Dynamic Wireless Power Transfer Employing a Floating-Frequency Switching Algorithm and an Optimized Coil Shape

Abstract

This paper offers a new EF-class converter for dynamic wireless power transfer application. The proposed high-frequency converter employs a floating-frequency switching algorithm to control the converter in a continuous frequency range, eliminate the requirement to any additional operational data from the secondary (receiver) side, accelerate the load impedance match while moving, maximize the transferred power rate, reduce charging interval and compensate power transfer tolerances. Moreover, an optimized super elliptical shape coil is designed to cope with lateral misalignment, enhance coil coupling, and increase efficiency. In the proposed converter, (i) soft switching is implemented to increase switching frequency, decrease passive components size, and improve power density, (ii) undesired voltage harmonics are attenuated to reduce peak voltage stress of the power switch in a wide frequency range, (iii) the receiver side is enabled for higher mobility with stable power transfer, and (iv) the resonant frequency is updated to compensate non-accurate values of passive components in experimental prototyping. In this study, the operational analytics, compensation method, control algorithm, coil design and converter optimization are followed with some comparisons to present the converter capabilities. In addition, simulation and experimental results are provided under different degrees of misalignment to verify the accuracy of theoretical analytics.