Contactless Power Transfer for Rail-Guided Vehicles with Power Equalization and Efficiency Improvement Considerations

This article proposes a contactless power transfer for rail-guided vehicles with power equalization and efficiency improvement considerations. This study is motivated since the rail-guided vehicles may encounter the power imbalance and low efficiency during the power transfer under a multireceiver environment. Therefore, the article is devoted to designing an approach of evenly dispatching power among receivers as well as developing a tracking compensation technique to search the maximum power-transmitting efficiency under different number of receiving modules. Through this proposed method, the constant power output, power equalization, and efficiency improvement are all achieved. Circuit derivation, frequency response, and resonance features are all made. A hardware circuit is also realized with different tests carried out under various scenarios. The maximum efficiency of this system is recorded to be 90.3%, supporting the practicality of the method. Experimental outcome gained from this study is beneficial for on-rail charging applications.