Load Voltage and Current Observers for Series-Series Wireless Power Transfer System

Because a transmitter-side controller of an inductive power transfer (IPT) system cannot directly measure its load conditions, i.e., receiver-side output voltages and currents, wireless communications are commonly used in many IPT systems. However, the wireless communication can cause a devastating failure of the IPT system because of its tens of milliseconds delays and frequent data losses. The mismatch between the transmitted and the received power can destroy the receiver-side power converters. In this article, receiver-side load voltage and current observers for a series-series tuned IPT system are proposed using the well-known disturbance observer theories. A load current observer that has a 10 kHz estimation bandwidth and a load voltage observer that has a 200 Hz bandwidth are proposed. The estimated load voltage and current have much faster dynamics than the wireless feedback signals without any data loss. Therefore, the proposed observers can bring significant advances in reliability and performance of the IPT system. Design guidelines for the observers that have low steady-state errors and fast dynamics are suggested. The theoretical performances of the proposed observers are evaluated by simulations and experiments. The simulated frequency- and time-domain responses of the proposed observers are consistent with the theoretical results. An experimental testbed was built to evaluate the proposed observers. The estimated current follows its actual value in 0.1 ms and the estimated voltage follows its measured value in 4 ms as expected from the simulations.