Design and implementation of a novel WPT system for railway applications

Abstract

As the power demand for some railway applications rises up to the Megawatt level, the conventional Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) system can hardly meet the power requirements for rail vehicles due to capacity constraints of power electronic devices. In order to improve the power capacity of the WPT system, a novel dual transmitters and dual receivers based WPT system is proposed. The dual transmitters are totally overlapped and located close to each other to enhance the magnetic field, which results in a non-negligible mutual crossing coupling between the transmitters. Besides, the dual receivers are located to capture the magnetic field simultaneously, and the cross coupling between the receivers is also non-negligible. The effects of the mutual crossings between the transmitters and that between the receivers are analyzed. It shows that the cross couplings will decrease the efficiency and transmitted power. Decoupling transformers (DTs) are employed to mitigate the effects of the cross couplings. Finally, a low scale experimental setup is provided to verify the proposed approach. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method could improve the transmitted power and overall efficiency, simultaneously.