Tripolar Pad for Inductive Power Transfer Systems for EV Charging

A recently proposed magnetic structure called Tripolar Pad (TPP) is investigated as a primary pad in an inductive power transfer battery charging system for electric vehicles. In this paper, a TPP primary is evaluated for 3.3 kW power transfer to both a circular pad and a bipolar pad as secondary pads. A mathematical model is presented to describe the power transfer from the TPP primary to the secondary pads then a control scheme is proposed which exploits the mutual decoupling between the TPP coils to find optimal primary currents. The optimization of the primary currents in the TPP improved the effective coupling factor over traditional topologies, particularly when the secondary was misaligned, and maintained leakage magnetic flux below International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection guidelines. The result for the proposed TPP is validated with practical measurements.