Design Considerations of An Inductive Power Transfer System for Rail Application

Inductive power transfer (IPT) technology has been extensively studied for electric vehicles (EV) in the past decades. However, it has not drawn much attention in railway application. Due to the unique requirements of the railway system, most of the EV coupler designs are not directly compatible with wireless charging applications for a train. To fill this technical gap, this paper discusses the design considerations for railway application and introduces a design of a modular 5-kW IPT system for rail locomotives. According to the design constraints, a novel W-I coupler is proposed for the 5-kW IPT system and the system is optimized via ANSYS Maxwell. A prototype of the proposed IPT system is developed at an airgap of 5 inches and 85 kHz operating frequency. The prototype has been validated in a 1.7 kW output power supply with a DC to DC efficiency of 85.6%. The experimental results validate the feasibility of the IPT system design for rail application.