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.

This paper proposes a technique for the control of the charging process in a dynamic inductive power transfer system for automotive applications. This technique is based on an impedance control loop on the receiver side. The proposed control allows different phases of the charging process to be carried out in the absence of a communication link between the ground and the vehicle side. The charging process starts with a sensorless procedure for the identification of the actual presence of the vehicle over the receiver. The same control technique introduces several advantages of interoperability between systems having different requirements in terms of the power demand. A 11-kW prototype has been implemented based on a transmitter 1.5-m long as compromise solution between the long track coil and the lumped one. The power management of the receiver side is provided by a nine-phase interleaved boost converter. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed control together with a good matching with the developed theoretical equations set for the system description.

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 this paper, starting from the experimental experience of the road embedment of a transmitting coil for wireless power transfer, a numerical model of such device is constructed. The model is then used to perform several parametric analyses which aim at investigating the influence of the main electromagnetic parameters of the concrete and the geometrical parameters of the wireless power transfer on the overall behavior of the device. The results of such study allow for providing guidelines for the design of the coil and the choice of the materials for the embedment. Moreover, as a secondary result of the adopted methodology, the electromagnetic characterization of the concrete adopted for the road embedment is obtained.