Wireless power transfer system (WPTS)-based wireless electric vehicles, classified into roadway-powered electric vehicles (RPEVs) and stationary charging electric vehicles (SCEVs), are in the spotlight as future mainstream transportations. RPEVs are free from serious battery problems such as large, heavy, and expensive battery packs and long charging time because they get power directly from the road while moving. The power transfer capacity, efficiency, lateral tolerance, electromagnetic field, air-gap, size, weight, and cost of the WPTSs have been improved by virtues of innovative semiconductor switches, better coil designs, roadway construction techniques, and higher operating frequency. Recent advances in WPTSs for RPEVs are summarized in this review paper. The fifth- and sixth-generation online electric vehicles, which reduce infrastructure cost for commercialization, and the interoperability between RPEVs and SCEVs are addressed in detail in this paper. Major milestones of the developments of other RPEVs are also summarized. The rest of this paper deals with a few important technical issues such as coil structures, power supply schemes, and segmentation switching techniques of a lumped inductive power transfer system for RPEVs.

Roadway-powered electric vehicles (RPEVs) are attractive candidates for future transportation because they do not rely on large and heavy batteries but directly and efficiently get power while moving along a road. The inductive power transfer systems (IPTSs) that have been widely used for the wireless powering of RPEVs are reviewed in this paper. The development history of the IPTS is tracked from the origin of the RPEV in the 1890s to the recent RPEV. Throughout its 100-year history, the size, weight, efficiency, air gap, lateral tolerance, electromagnetic force, and cost of the IPTS have been substantially improved, and now RPEVs are becoming more widely commercialized. Important milestones of the developments of the IPTS and RPEVs are summarized in this paper, focusing on recent developments of on-line electric vehicles that were first commercialized in 2013.

New cross-segmented power supply rails for roadway-powered electric vehicles are proposed in this paper for reducing construction cost and EMF. The proposed rail consists of two pairs of power cables, core, bidirectional power switches, a transformer, capacitors, and harness. Each rail is connected through a switch box, which can change the current direction of a pair of power cables. Hence, adding the current of the two pairs of power cables results in the activation mode while nullifying it does the silence mode. A coupling transformer with two capacitors is introduced to compensate the variable line inductance of the rail due to the change of current direction. Therefore, multiple rails can be concurrently activated by selective turning-on and turning-off the power switches using an inverter. In addition, the EMF for the silence mode is drastically reduced if a twisted pair of power cables and copper nets is used, so that the ICNIRP guideline 6.25 μT at 20-kHz operating frequency can be met. The proposed cross-segmented power supply rail was implemented for experiments and verified for practical applications.

Asymmetric coil sets for wireless stationary electric vehicle (EV) chargers, which has significantly larger lateral tolerance than previous ones, is proposed. The pick-up coil set is much smaller than the power supply coil set, thereby allowing large lateral and longitudinal displacements as well as robustness to air-gap displacement. Electromagnetic field (EMF) is reasonably reduced by arranging magnetic poles along the EV's moving direction so that alternating magnetic flux through adjacent poles cancels each other. A dominant field analysis useful for complex vector magnetic flux simulation is newly proposed, which is applicable to any resonating coils of an inductive power transfer system (IPTS). Furthermore, a hysteresis loss model is suggested, which appropriately reflects the partial core saturation on a system analysis. A prototype IPTS including the proposed coil sets were designed and successfully verified by experiments. In the quick charging mode, maximum output power of 15 kW, large lateral displacement of 40 cm, longitudinal displacement of 20 cm, air gap of 15 cm were achieved, and low EMF of 6.1 μT at 20 kHz was achieved in the normal charging mode of 5 kW.

In the inductive power transfer systems (IPTSs) of wireless electric vehicles (WEV), the electromagnetic field (EMF) should be lowered for the safety of pedestrians. In general, the EMF should be canceled for every space, time, and load condition of interest. Three generalized design methods for cancelling the EMF of WEV are proposed in this paper. By adding active EMF cancel coils to each primary main coil and secondary main coil, respectively, the EMF generated from each main coil can be independently cancelled by their corresponding cancel coils. Moreover, the EMF can be successfully mitigated if a dominant EMF source only is cancelled with 3-dB margin, which can be applied to any resonant type wireless power transfer systems. Furthermore, no significant power drop may occur if the cancel coils are placed aside from magnetic coupling path. Design examples are shown for U-type and W-type IPTS as well as a wireless stationary EV charger. Experimental verifications are shown for a recently developed I-type IPTS, which has a narrow rail width structure with alternating magnetic polarity along with a roadway. The proposed design methods have been demonstrated, without the loss of generality, to only the secondary coil where relatively large EMF is generated due to high ampere turns. An optimum spacing for cancel coils from main coils and an optimum number of turns are determined. Through experiments, additional EMF mitigation techniques such as the magnetic mirror method, separating pick-up rectifiers, and passive Al plate are provided. Thus, the EMF at 1 m distance from the center of a pick-up becomes under 44 mG even for the maximum power of 12 kW.

An ultraslim S-type power supply rail, which has a width of only 4 cm, for roadway-powered electric vehicles (RPEVs) is proposed in this paper. The cross section of the core has a thin S-shape, and a vertically-wound multiturn coil is displaced inside the core. In this way, the most slim power supply rail is designed, which is crucial for the commercialization of RPEVs. The construction of roadway infrastructure, which is responsible for more than 80% of the total deployment cost for RPEVs, can be much easier when the width of the power supply rail is so small. To increase portability and to minimize construction time, a foldable power supply module is also proposed in which flexible power cables connect each foldable power supply module such that no connectors are needed during deployment. An effective winding method for minimizing the cable length is proposed, and an optimum core thickness of the proposed power supply rail is determined by FEA simulations and verified by a prototype power supply module. By virtue of the ultraslim shape, a large lateral displacement of 30 cm at an air gap of 20 cm was experimentally obtained, which is 6 cm larger than that of the I-type power supply rail. In addition to the larger lateral displacement, it is estimated that the S-type one has lower EMF than the I-type one because the width of the S-type one is narrower than that of I-type one. The maximum efficiency, excluding the inverter, was 91%, and the pick-up power was 22 kW.