Novel IPT system for enhanced efficiency and anti-misalignment capability

Inductive power transfer (IPT) systems are playing an increasingly important role in electric vehicles, rail transit, industrial production and daily life. In the above practical applications, the misalignment of coupling coils is a very common phenomenon. To achieve high efficiency and a stable output under coil misalignment, a novel hybrid IPT system with a four-coil coupler is presented in this paper. The presented IPT system only uses a single mode switch to satisfy the battery charging requirements. When compared with existing typical IPT systems, the presented IPT system has fewer compensation components, and does not need complex control, a communication link between the transmitter and the receiver, and frequency switching. Moreover, to ameliorate the misalignment tolerance of the system, a Double-D/Bipolar (DD/BP) four-coil coupler is applied to the presented IPT topology. A 680 W experimental prototype with a 94.7% peak efficiency is built to verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme. Experimental results indicate that the presented IPT system can cope with simultaneous variations of the load and coupling coefficient within a ± 150 mm misalignment in the Y-axis and a ± 15 mm in the X-axis.