A novel contact-less battery charger for electric vehicles

A simple and reliable contactless battery charger for electric vehicle applications is proposed. The principle of the charger is based on the so-called one converter circuit for power factor correction. The converter also works as a high-frequency inverter. Charging conditions are effectively controlled by the frequency of a new type of magnetic multivibrator composed of two MOSFETs and two saturable reactors. As a result of experiments on a 1.7 kW output prototype charger, the authors achieved a charging efficiency of 87.4% at total one cycle charging, an overall efficiency of 90% and over 98% input power factor.