Design of a High-Efficiency Wireless Power Transfer System With Intermediate Coils for the On-Board Chargers of Electric Vehicles

In this paper, a high efficiency inductive wireless power transfer system for the on-board chargers of electric vehicles is proposed. In order to improve the power transfer efficiency, the proposed system adopts two additional intermediate coils with resonant capacitors, which increases the effective magnetizing impedance between the transmitter and receiver coils with no ferrites. The resonant tank of the proposed system is designed to operate the converter as a current source and as a voltage source at two different frequencies to implement the constant current (CC) mode charge and constant voltage (CV) charge, respectively. Since the proposed converter operates at a fixed frequency in each mode of charge operation, full soft switching of all the switching devices is possible and the zero phase angle condition can be achieved in both the CC and CV mode operations. A theoretical analysis based on a Thevenin model to come up with a suitable design for the battery charger and its closed-loop controller is presented and its superior performance is demonstrated by experimental results. A 6.6 kW prototype is implemented with a 200 mm air gap to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the dc to dc conversion efficiency of the proposed system is 97.08% at 3.7 kW of output power in the CV mode charge.