Self-Contained Solar-Powered Inductive Power Transfer System for Wireless Electric Vehicle Charging

In order to alleviate energy shortage and environmental pollution, there is an increasing demand to exploit renewable energy and promote electric vehicle (EV). It is relatively mature and easy to exploit widely distributed solar energy, which can be converted to clean electricity by using commercially available photovoltaic (PV) panels. In this paper, we propose a self-contained solar-powered wireless EV charging system, which operates independently without interaction with the power grid, resulting in low building cost and wide selection of building sites. Moreover, inductive power transfer (IPT) technology is incorporated in the proposed system for wireless charging, bring the advantages of friendly experience, safe operation and low maintenance cost. The proposed system has minimum converter stage, where the IPT converter is driven by the PV panels and loaded by the battery directly. Operation of maximum power point tracking (MPPT) for the PV panels and maximum efficiency point tracking (MPET) for the IPT converter are theoretically analyzed and experimentally verified.