An Inductive Power Transfer System Design for Rail Applications

An Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) system for rail applications is proposed in this paper. IPT has attractive features for battery charging in electric vehicles and consumer electronics. For those applications, IPT technology has already been commercialized in the market for practical use. However, due to the unique requirement of rail applications on the power ratings and intrinsic disadvantages of IPT compared with wired charging on misalignment and Electromagnetic Field (EMF) leakage, IPT has not been commercialized for rail applications in U.S. so far. To fill these gaps, this paper introduces an IPT design with advantages of good geometry integration to rail tracks, high inductive coupling and low EMF leakage. Two I-type ferrite cores are paralleled as one lumped transmitter and one rectangular ferrite plate is coupled as the onboard receiver. The designed IPT system is aimed at 1 kW onboard battery charging on a park gauge train at UNC Charlotte. The multi-objective optimization based magnetic and electrical systems co-design is proposed to meet system specifications and optimize system performance. The co-simulation results are presented to verify the performance of proposed IPT system design.