A new contactiess power pick-up with continuous variable inductor control using magnetic amplifier

This paper proposes a new contactless power pickup with a LCL tuning circuit which utilizes the magnetic amplifier as a variable inductor. The tuning circuit of the power pick-up is based on the LCL configuration and provides a simple relationship between the open circuit voltage of the pick-up coil and the output voltage regardless of the load variation. The use of magnetic amplifier as a variable inductor offers significant advantages where the inductance is dynamically varied using a controller and BJT to deliver power under a variety of load conditions. The proposed method can significantly improve the overall performance of the ICPT (inductively coupled power transfer) system by producing continuous waveforms within the system at all times. Simulations based on PLECS (a Simulink toolbox) demonstrate that the new method can successfully control the output voltage resulting in satisfactory steady state performance.