An Overview of Reactive Power Compensation Strategies in Inductive Power Transfer Systems

Inductive power transfer is a safe, reliable and simple way to transfer energy without wires, and therefore it is widely studied and applied. However, due to the great amount of reactive energy generated by the loose coupling between inductors, the system can be inefficient. For this reason, reactive power compensation techniques using capacitors are adopted. There are four basic approaches to compensation using two capacitors and, for each topology, there are specific applications. This paper presents the equations, waveforms, and possible applications for each topology with voltage and current power source in the input and fixed frequency. Inductor resistances are included, and the power range of the waveforms is from 0 to 10
$\text{kW}$
. A reference review is presented with applications, advantages and drawbacks of each topology. For each topology, the nature of the output source can be changed only by altering the nature of the input power source, without the need of rearrange the topology's structure.