Analysis and Design of Inductive and Capacitive Hybrid Wireless Power Transfer System for Railway Application

Inductive power transfer (IPT) and capacitive power transfer (CPT) are mainly two effective ways to achieve wireless power transfer (WPT). IPT system needs capacitor to compensate the system, while the CPT system requires inductor to tune the system. Therefore, IPT coupler can be used to compensate the CPT coupler and vice versa. In this article, an inductive and capacitive hybrid wireless power transfer (HWPT) system is proposed to improve the system coupler antimisalignment ability. The couplers of IPT and CPT are employed together to compensate each other and transfer power together. Superposition theory is used to analyze the system working principle in detail. With the analysis results, a scaled-down system is built to validate the performance of the proposed approach. Experimental results show that the proposed HWPT system can achieve 653 W output power with 87.7% dc-dc efficiency at the well-aligned condition, and the maximum variation of the output power is 8.3% with the coupler misalignment from 0 to 270 mm (halfwidth of the coupler), which agree well with the analysis results.