A Research and Testing Laboratory for Contactless Power Transfer Systems

Abstract

Contactless power transfer is at present a successful unconventional method for using the electromagnetic field properties, with many practical advantages in the most different activity fields: robotics, connectics, lighting, medicine, easy to use in water, aggressive or potentially explosive environment. The non-radiative methods for power transfer in near field (electric, magnetic), where the efficiency is comparable with that of galvanic contact transmission for short and medium distances, are developing. Many theoretical or experimental publications were focused until now on inductive power transfer (IPT) at low powers (tens of W), but at present the electric vehicles (EV) development imposes to approach high powers (kW) necessary to charge the batteries. As a result, the problems of overall efficiency, optimization of the figure of merit for inductive coupler in real operating conditions, working frequency and thermal regime of an industrial application became essential. For these reasons, the existence of a specialized research, development and testing laboratory in Romania became important and this laboratory is shown in the paper.