A Three-Phase Bi-Directional IPT System for Contactless Charging of Electric Vehicles

Contactless and bi-directional power transfer is preferable for applications such as electric vehicles (EVs) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) systems. This paper presents a new three-phase and bi-directional IPT system that is suitable for rapid charging of EVs or high power V2G systems. The proposed system uses a three-phase track, which is coupled to a three-phase pick-up through weak magnetic coupling. Both track and pick-up are var compensated through an inductor-capacitor-inductor (LCL) resonant circuit and driven by reversible rectifiers. A mathematical model is presented to show that power transfer from the track (primary) side to the pick-up side in both directions can be controlled through either magnitude or relative phase angle of the voltages generated by reversible rectifiers. The viability of the proposed concept is demonstrated using simulations, and results suggest that the three-phase IPT system is suitable for high power applications and is superior in performance to its single-phase counterpart.