Concept study and feasibility analysis of current-fed power electronics for wireless power transfer system

This paper studies and explores feasibility of wireless inductive power transfer (IPT) systems using current source inverter (CSI) topology for electric vehicle battery charging applications. Possible IPT systems with CSI topology includes current-fed push-pull, half-bridge and full-bridge converters. Also the possible compensation or resonant tank network at transmitter side is parallel LC or CCL type. Receiver side tank network is generally selected as series LC type to keep least number of components onboard. First, a brief overview of all possible IPT power supplies suitable for medium power applications is presented. This IPT topologies include series, parallel and several combinations of series-parallel compensation networks. Then a detailed study and comparison is presented for several current-fed IPT systems. Based on the study both the current-fed full-bridge and half-bridge topologies with CCL tank network provides performances suitable for higher power applications. A 1.2kW hardware prototype is developed and experimental results are presented to verify the comparative study results.