A New Bifurcation-Free Inductive Power Transfer System with Interoperable Power Level Capability for Wireless Charging of Electric Vehicles

The bifurcation phenomenon in inductive power transfer (IPT) based wireless charging prevents the use of the same transmitter for charging an electric vehicle (EV) at multiple power levels. Thus, it requires a separate IPT charger for every power level. Consequently, it lacks interoperability across multiple power levels, which restricts system compatibility and increases infrastructure costs. This manuscript presents a new bifurcation-free interoperable IPT system capable of stable multi-power-level operation using a single coupler architecture. The proposed configuration includes an active clamped inverter (ACI) and a tapping-based transmitter coil with a reconfigurable compensation. The operating principles of ACI and the systematic bifurcation-free design of the tapped-based coil are discussed in detail. The proposed coupler is designed analytically and verified through finite element analysis (FEA). The efficacy of the proposed IPT system is validated through MATLAB simulations and tested through a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-controlled scaled-down silicon-carbide (SiC) based laboratory prototype. Experimental results demonstrate that the designed multi-power-level IPT system effectively transfers power without the bifurcation phenomenon under aligned and misaligned conditions meeting the SAE J2954 and ICNIRP standards.