Double Coupling In-Wheel IPT System for Electric Vehicles

The electric automotive industry revolutionizes the transportation sector with new disruptive technologies like wireless charging systems and the tire industry is no exception. New airless and sustainable tire designs offer new possibilities to embody wireless charging technologies. This paper presents a novel in-Wheel Inductive Power Transfer (inWIPT) batteries charger design for electric vehicles (EV). The proposed system uses two magnetic couplers (MC) to transfer the energy: one from the off-board side to the wheel and another from the wheel to the on-board side. The proposed configuration keeps the air gap between the off-board transmitter pad and the wheel receiver to a minimum and almost independent of the vehicle type (Sedan, Suv, Truck). The two MCs are connected by a new resonant tank which modifies the voltage transfer characteristics. A step by step methodology that identifies the operational range of the mutual inductances, based on certain design specifications and constraints, is also presented. Experimental results validate the proposed inWIPT in a quasi load independent voltage operation in different coupling charging scenarios and a maximum output power of 2.6 kW with an efficiency of 89.3%.