A Clamp Circuit-Based Inductive Power Transfer System With Reconfigurable Rectifier Tolerating Extensive Coupling Variations

Coupling variation tolerance is one of the most crucial abilities of the inductive power transfer (IPT) system because the variable coupling can dramatically degrade the output power. This letter proposes a clamp circuit-based IPT system with a reconfigurable rectifier featuring high antimisalignment. The clamp circuit can adaptively switch from one stable operating region to the other according to the coupling coefficients. The reconfigurable rectifier can work in half-bridge mode or full-bridge mode, which can build another two adaptively switching stable operating regions such that the proposed IPT system can provide nearly stable output power resisting extensive coupling variations. A 400-W prototype was built to verify the theoretical analysis. The experimental results indicate that the output power fluctuation of the proposed method is only 5.98% when the coupling coefficient varies from 0.1 to 0.4 (400%), and the system efficiency is from 86.1% to 94.3%. The proposed method does not need complicated control or dedicated coil design, and it can implement significant antimisalignment improvement.