The paper discusses the development status of the inductive power transmission for automotive applications. This technology is, in fact, gaining the interest of electric vehicle manufacturers as an effective strategy to improve the market penetration of electric mobility. Starting from the origin of this technology, the paper presents an overview of the current state of the art as well as the current research and industrial projects. Particular attention is devoted to the description of a prototypal system for the dynamic inductive power transmission whose goal is to extend the battery range by a fast partial recharging during the movement of the vehicle.

The aim of this work is to propose and validate a novel multi-objective optimization algorithm based on the emulation of the behaviour of the immune system. The rationale of this work is that the artificial immune system has, in its elementary structure, the main features required by other multi-objective evolutionary algorithms described in the literature, such as diversity preservation, memory, adaptivity, and elitism. The proposed approach is compared with three multi-objective evolutionary algorithms that are representative of the state of the art in multi-objective optimization. Algorithms are tested on six standard problems (both unconstrained and constrained) and comparisons are carried out using three different metrics. Results show that the proposed approach has very good performances and can become a valid alternative to standard algorithms for solving multi-objective optimization problems.

This paper proposes a methodology for the assessment of the human exposure to magnetic fields generated by dynamic inductive power transfer systems for automotive applications. Since the magnetic field is pulsed, current safety standards and guidelines require the use of time-domain approaches to evaluate the peak exposure which has to be limited under the prescribed limits. This paper shows that, for these kind of systems, the peak exposure can be efficiently evaluated by means of a time-harmonic formulation. Furthermore, a methodology to identify the worst case scenario is proposed.

In 1996, a superconducting magnetic energy storage arrangement was selected to become a benchmark problem for testing different optimization algorithms, both deterministic and stochastic ones. Since the forward problem can be solved semianalytically by Biot-Savart's law, this benchmark became quite popular. Nevertheless, the demands on optimization software have increased dramatically since then. To give an example, methods looking for Pareto-optimal points rather than for a single solution only have been introduced by several groups. In this paper, a proposal for an extended version of the benchmark problem will be made and some results will be presented.

The analytical study of grounding systems is only possible for basic electrodes, i.e., hemispherical and spherical electrodes, rods, and horizontal wires. However, it is normal practice to employ more complex earthing systems, such as grounding grids integrated with rods, in order to obtain lower resistances to ground and improve the electrical safety of substations. This paper introduces a semianalytical (or seminumerical) method, consisting of an analytical approach integrated with a numerical solution, to study grounding grids of complex geometry and their effects on non stratified soils. The algorithm that was created and realized with MATLAB allows the determination of all the quantities of interest for the design and the analysis of such grounding systems, i.e., ground resistance, ground potentials, and distribution of the ground-fault current along the grid's components (i.e., horizontal wires and rods). The model is based on the assumption that conductors forming grids have very small radii if compared with their lengths and that the wires can be considered equipotential cylindrical elements. A verification of the proposed algorithm through a finite-element method has been also carried out to confirm the validity of the results. Exemplary calculations of the ground resistance of grids are included in this paper.