Comparison of Basic Inductive Power Transfer Systems With Linear Control Achieving Optimized Efficiency

Inductive power transfer (IPT) systems with front-side and load-side converters are generally developed for better overall system efficiency than a single IPT converter by providing maximum efficiency tracking and output regulation against variations of coupling coefficient (k) and load. The optimum efficiency point of an IPT converter is at a particular loading resistance, which varies with k and is hard to measure directly for the purpose of control. Perturb and observe control is normally implemented to iteratively track the optimum efficiency point. However, this heuristic algorithm results in slow response to the variations of k and load. Recently, a much faster linear control for optimum efficiency tracking has been developed for the series-series (SS) IPT system only. This paper proposes a general linear control scheme for all four basic IPT systems to track the optimum efficiency point. Unlike the SS IPT converter, it is found that additional control of either frequency or adaptive compensation is needed for the other three basic IPT converters to operate against the variation of k. Different input to output transfer functions and their k- and load-independent properties at optimum efficiency are identified for all four basic IPT systems. Thus, a general fast linear control can be applied in the front-side converter to achieve optimum efficiency, while the load-side converter regulates the output power independently. Furthermore, the maximum efficiencies of the IPT converters with these four basic compensations for an identical loosely-coupled transformer are compared theoretically and verified experimentally. The parallel-parallel IPT converter gives the best efficiency. Its additional frequency control in conjunction with the optimum efficiency tracking and the output power regulation is also experimentally validated.