An Energy Injection Method to Improve Power Transfer Capability of Bidirectional WPT System With Multiple Pickups

Abstract

Track wireless power transfer (WPT) systems are increasingly used for monorail robots, industrial transportation, etc. Conventionally, the track WPT system's primary power supply is designed to be equal or higher than the total running pickups’ rated power. However, in practice, some of the pickups may transiently require more power than their normal operating state. It is not cost effective to increase the power rating of the primary source for the transient case. Hence, this article proposes a method to strengthen the track's power transfer capability by reversely injecting energy from available online pickups to the transiently over-rated one. A bioperation mode is proposed, which includes both the normal operation and the strengthening operation. A bidirectional pickup topology is used, and the equivalent circuit is analyzed accounting the bioperation mode. In addition, a synchronization method of the primary and reverse injection pickups is proposed. A criterion to determine the boundary of the reverse energy injection is also presented. By detecting the peak current, this energy injection method can be practically implemented and the proposed method is verified through the experimental results.