Wireless/Contactless Power Supply

For more than a century it has been known that
signals and power can be transferred
electromagnetically. This knowledge has motivated
substantial research and development into wireless
signal transmission which today is widely used. Power
transfer across air gaps, however, has tended to be
restricted to electric machines that have tight
magnetic couplings. It is only very recently that a
novel technology termed IPT (Inductive Power
Transfer) has made wireless/contactless power delivery
to movable objects a practical reality.
This research work presents the basic concept of
contactless/wireless power transfer and typical IPT
systems that employ modern power conversion, control,
and magnetic coupling techniques to achieve clean and
reliable power transfer without direct electrical
contacts. Both current-fed parallel and voltage-fed
series resonant converters are fully investigated
using mathematical analysis, computer simulations,
and practical experiments to evaluate their
properties and usability in practical systems. Two
new resonant converters are proposed which show
excellent dynamic soft switching performance suitable
for wireless/contactless power transfer applications.