Opportunities and challenges of metamaterial-based wireless power transfer for electric vehicles

This paper reviews previous studies on metamaterials and its application to wireless power transfer (WPT) technologies, as well as discussing about development opportunities and technical challenges for the contactless charging of electric vehicles (EVs). The EV establishes a bridge between sustainable energies and our daily transportation, especially the park-and-charge and move-and-charge for EVs have attracted increasing attentions from the academia and the industry. However, the metamaterials-based WPT has been nearly unexplored specifically for EVs by now. Accordingly, this paper gives an overview for the metamaterial-based WPT technologies, with emphasizes on enhancing efficiency, increasing distance, improving misalignment tolerance, and compacting size. From the perspective of EV wireless charging, this paper discusses about the breakthrough to current WPT technique bottlenecks and prospective EV charging scenarios by utilizing the left-handed material. Meanwhile, the technical issues to be addressed are also summarized in this paper, which aims to arouse emerging research topics for the future development of EV wireless charging systems.