Basic Study of Solar Battery Powered Wireless Power Transfer System with MPPT Mode and DC Bus Stabilization for Lunar Rover

Due to the extremely low temperature of Moon surface at lunar night, lunar rover has suffered from heat leakage along the wire connection between solar battery and rover body. In this paper, a wireless power transfer system has been proposed to transfer energy from solar battery to rover body in order to aovid the heat leakage at lunar night. The solar battery is controlled by a buck converter to be switched between the Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) mode and buck mode to output appropriate amount energy to load and battery in rover body through the wireless power transfer system. The load and battery is connected to the DC bus which is controlled by a DC-DC converter to stabilize the voltage. Based on the experiment results, the whole system efficiency is about 48.7% at 22 W. It has been demonstrated the system efficiency is closely related with system power level due to the power electronics wasted power, and the efficiency can be improved to 62.1% with higher system power at 48.6 W.