Zane, Regan; Kamineni, Abhilash; Nimri, Reebal (Utah State University)
Faculty Advisor: Kamineni, Abhilash (College of Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department); Zane, Regan (College of Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department)
Transportation electrification will bring a positive effect on sustainable environments and robust economies. Electric Vehicles (EV) are emerging in today's market as a solution. However, the battery technologies on EV cannot compete with fuel and diesel cars in terms of energy storage capacity, and time needed to recharge (equivalently refuel). These limitations directly reflect on the consumers' convenience, the max miles the Vehicle can perform for, and hence EV adoption. Wireless power transfer (WPT) systems are seen as a solution to ease consumers' transition to EV. A high-level diagram of WPT is shown in Figure (**).
Major advancements in WPT technology has enabled the commercialization of stationary WPT solutions — materials technology has been a major impediment. Hence, academia and industry are jointly considering more advanced solutions in WPT, namely Dynamic Wireless Power Transfer (DWPT). Implementing DWPT systems will permit on the go charging for EV the upper hand over present charging (equivalently fueling) methods and encourage EV adoption. This document reflects on some of the challenges of realizing an effective DWPT that maintains power transfer between the primary pad and secondary pad, and a proposed solution to allow dynamic charging. Also, the proposed DWPT offers compatibility with SAE J2954 (Wireless Power Transfer for Light-Duty Plug-in/Electric Vehicles and Alignment Methodology) WPT3Z3 pad.
A comprehensive approach was taken in the design of the primary pad to validate the power transfer requirements for the designed pads. The proposed solution consists of a custom primary pad and a custom secondary pad for dynamic charging. This document will refer to the custom primary pad and a custom secondary pad as DGA and DVA, respectively. DGA offers compatibility with WPT2Z3 for dynamic charging and DVA offers compatibility with the Universal Ground Assembly (UGA) for stationary charging.