A Nonmonotonic Parameter Design Approach for Compact Capacitive Power Transfer

Abstract

Coupler misalignment or load variations occur in capacitive power transfer (CPT) and cause substantial power fluctuations. This work proposes a nonmonotonic parameter design approach to maintain power capacity of CPT systems with coupling and load variations. The method targets consistent output power with horizontal misalignment and varying loads without additional converters or closed-loop controls for a compact system. The method configures an optimum power extremum for target working conditions to reduce power fluctuations and can achieve predetermined power and misalignment ranges. The proposed method has higher misalignment and load adaptability tolerance compared to conventional parameter design methods. A 2.0 kW prototype is implemented and validated through experiments using a 60 mm air gap and 610 mm $\times 610$ mm outside coupler plates.

Keywords

• Capacitive power transfer
• load adaptability
• misalignment tolerance
• parametric design