On The Evaluation of a DD-DDQ Wireless Inductive Link in Electric Vehicle Chargers at Lateral Misalignments

Acknowledging the growing demand for clean and sustainable transportation solutions, extensive research and development efforts are taking place to improve the general performance of Electric Vehicles (EVs). One of the factors slowing down the adoption rate of EVs is the downtime required to charge the EV battery, during which the EV is idle. As a result, dynamic wireless charging (DWC) systems are gaining an increasing popularity by offering the advantage of on-the-move charging with no charging downtime. Yet, a major concern to DWC systems is the lateral misalignment (LM) of the vehicle, and hence the secondary coil, with respect to the primary one, and how it negatively affects the magnetic coupling process. To overcome this obstacle, double-D quadrature (DDQ) secondary coils are recommended in the literature, to help improve the coupling at a wider misalignment range. This work evaluates the performance of this DDQ secondary-side coil against a double-D (DD) primary-side transmitter, by studying the variations in the output voltage, current and power levels at different misalignment values against variations in the coupling coefficient. This helps explain the differences in coupling performance of the DD-DDQ inductive link during left-side and right-side misalignments.