Contactless Measurement of Current and Mutual Inductance in Wireless Power Transfer System Based on Sandwich Structure

The mutual inductance between the transmitter and receiver sides is critical for the efficiency of a wireless power transfer (WPT) system. This article proposes a novel online mutual inductance measurement method based on a local detection coil with a sandwich structure. The mutual inductance and the receiver current are obtained by measuring the induced voltage of the sandwich coil and the output voltage of the inverter, with contactless measurement from the receiver side. Using the ferrite substrate as the skeleton of the sandwich detection coil not only increases the differential mutual inductance between the receiver coil and the sandwich coil but also maintains the differential mutual inductance almost constant when horizontal misalignment occurs. Moreover, the differential mutual inductance is used to calculate the mutual inductance between the transmitter and receiver coils and the orthogonal eigenvalue expansion method is exploited to analyze the sandwich detection coil in a finite region. Then, the factors affecting the differential mutual inductance are analyzed and optimized, and a stable differential mutual inductance is obtained by formulating a standard coil design procedure. Finally, a prototype is built to verify the proposed method. The experimental results show that the differential mutual inductance remains almost constant when the horizontal misalignment reaches 50% of the outer radius of the transmitter/receiver coil, and the maximum calculated error of the detected mutual inductance is 2.18%.