Experiments of In-Vehicle Inductive High-Voltage Power Line Communication

In electric vehicles (EVs), high-voltage batteries supply power to power distribution units (PDUs) that drive motors, generators, blowers, and air conditioners through high-power cables. In the future, as the number of electronic devices in a vehicle increases, communication lines must be added for controlling the electronic devices. In this study, we proposed the application of inductive power line communication (PLC) to simplify EV wiring. An inductive coupler consisting of nano-crystalline cores was fabricated and applied to high voltage power lines of EVs to measure the performance of in-vehicle inductive PLC. As a result of the experiments, the high-voltage cable guarantees the data rate of 35Mbps. The real-time video transmission between the engine room and the trunk was successfully carried out. We expect that the inductive PLC in EVs will contribute to the simplification of communication lines and reduction of vehicle weight.