Switched Compensator for Contactless Power Transfer Systems

Contactless power transfer systems require compensators to improve power factor degradation caused by significant leakage inductance in the contactless power transformer. The most commonly used compensators are LC series- and parallel-resonant compensators. In this paper, we present a comparison between the characteristics of the compensators with a focus on transfer efficiency. Based on these characteristics, a compensator capable of switching between the LC parallel- and series-resonant topologies is proposed, and its changeover algorithm is explained. The proposed compensator was experimentally examined and was found to perform efficiently over a wider range of output power than conventional LC resonant compensators.