Design, modelling, and control for wireless power transfer: applications in future transportation
Project description
Electrification in the transportation sector has been strongly emphasized for the last several decades due environmental concerns and energy security concerns. Wireless power transfer (WPT) technologies, which enable safe, convenient and automated charging for electric vehicles, facilitate the future transportation towards a more sustainable and intelligent trend. Recently, the WPT technologies have been extensively studied, including power electronic topologies, compensation networks, magnetic couplers, as well as control strategies. However, there are still numerous challenges for the practical applications of this emerging technique.
For the static WPT system, one of the challenges is that the system needs to cope with a large operating range due to large variations in the battery voltage and the coupling coefficient. Besides, the impedance mismatching caused by coil misalignment and capacitance drift is also a major issue that has to be addressed for efficient and reliable operation of the system. For the dynamic WPT system, the key challenge is that the coupling coefficient between the transmitter and receiver pads varies significantly with the movement of the electric vehicles. The sharply varying coupling coefficient leads to dramatic fluctuation in the output power of the system, and thus, shortened battery life and weakened working stability of the battery charging system
Therefore, according to the aforementioned challenges, the PhD candidate will investigate how to broaden the efficient operating range for the static WPT system, and how to mitigate the power pulsation caused by the varying coupling coefficient in dynamic charging. Moreover, the application scenarios of these WPT systems will be investigated for the development of future transportation.
PhD candidate:
Gangwei Zhu: G.Zhu-2@tudelft.nl
Supervisor:
Jianning Dong: J.Dong-4@tudelft.nl
Promotor:
Pavol Bauer: P.Bauer@tudelft.nl