Design of Horizontally Aligned Six-Plate Capacitive Power Transfer for EV Charging Applications

Researchers have shown interest in wireless power transfer (WPT) technology for EV charging due to its salient features of safety, convenience, and the possibility of opportunity charging. Inductive power transfer (IPT) has been used commonly; however, it has an issue of misalignment intolerance and high cost. Alternatively, the capacitive power transfer (CPT)-based charging systems can be utilized, which offers better misalignment, lower cost, and lightweight. However, it displays lesser power density and efficiency than IPT systems. Therefore, the design of the CPT coupler is crucial to improving the CPT system performance. This paper presents a group of horizontally aligned six-plate couplers to achieve higher power transfer capability with better electric field shielding. The performance of these CPT couplers is holistically evaluated to get the best CPT coupler structure through finite-element analysis (FEA) in ANSYS-MAXWELL software. The results shows that HCC3 coupler performs better in terms of electric field emissions and HCC1 is suitable for high power EV charging.