Interoperability Improvement for Rectangular Pad and DD Pad of Wireless Electric Vehicle Charging System Based on Adaptive Position Adjustment

Wireless charging for electric vehicles has been investigated in recent years. One of the critical issues of the research is to improve the weak interoperability between two popular charging pads—rectangular pad (RCP) and double-D pad (DDP). This article intends to model the interoperability under pad misalignment and improve it by adjusting the pads’ relative position. First, the variation of interoperability with pad misalignment is analyzed by the flux model. Full output power and high transmission efficiency can be achieved when the two pads are misaligned to a certain distance. Second, the optimal misalignment is obtained by flux calculation and simulation. Third, an adaptive position adjustment method for the transmitting pad based on the variable-step perturbation and observation algorithm is proposed. By searching the maximum dc input current, the optimal position of the transmitting pad can be found. Finally, in the experiment, a 3.3 kW output with 95% coil-coil efficiency is realized when the RCP and DDP interoperate at the optimal position. Compared with the scenario without position adjustment, the improvement of output power and efficiency proves that the proposal can optimize the interoperability between the RCP and DDP.