New Cross-Segmented Power Supply Rails for Roadway-Powered Electric Vehicles

New cross-segmented power supply rails for roadway-powered electric vehicles are proposed in this paper for reducing construction cost and EMF. The proposed rail consists of two pairs of power cables, core, bidirectional power switches, a transformer, capacitors, and harness. Each rail is connected through a switch box, which can change the current direction of a pair of power cables. Hence, adding the current of the two pairs of power cables results in the activation mode while nullifying it does the silence mode. A coupling transformer with two capacitors is introduced to compensate the variable line inductance of the rail due to the change of current direction. Therefore, multiple rails can be concurrently activated by selective turning-on and turning-off the power switches using an inverter. In addition, the EMF for the silence mode is drastically reduced if a twisted pair of power cables and copper nets is used, so that the ICNIRP guideline 6.25 μT at 20-kHz operating frequency can be met. The proposed cross-segmented power supply rail was implemented for experiments and verified for practical applications.