CONTACTLESS ENERGY TRANSFER

Abstract

In this paper a new topology for contactless energy transfer is proposed and tested
that can transfer energy to a moving actuator using inductive coupling. The proposed
topology provides long-stroke contactless energy transfer capability in a plane and a
short-stroke movement of a few millimeters perpendicular to the plane. In addition, it is
to lerant to small rotations. The experimental setup consists of a platform with one
secondary coil, which is attached to a linear actuator and a 3-phase brushless
electromotor. Underneath the platform is an array of primary coils that are each
connected to a half-bridge square wave power supply. The energy transfer to the
electromotor is measured while the platform is moved over the array of primary coils by
the linear actuator. The secondary coil moves with a stroke of 18cm at speeds over 1m/s,
while up to 33W power is transferred with 90% efficiency.

INTRODUCTION
 Most high-precision machines are positioning stages with Multiple degrees
of freedom(DOF), which often consist of cascaded long-and short-stroke linear
actuators that are supported by mechanical or air bearings. Usually, the long stroke
actuator has micrometer accuracy, while the Submicron accuracy is achieved by the
short-stroke actuator. To build a high-precision machine, as much disturbances as
possible should be eliminated. Common sources of disturbances are vibrations,
Coulomb and viscous friction in bearings, crosstalk of multiple cascaded actuators
and cable slabs.
A possibility to increase throughput, while maintaining accuracy is to use parallel
processing, i.e. movement and positioning in parallel within section, calibration,
assembling, scanning, etc. To meet the design requirements of high accuracy while
improving performance, a new design approach is necessary, especially if vacuum
operation is considered, which will be required for the next generation no lithography
machines. A lot of disturbance sources can be eliminated by integrating the cascaded
long-and short-stroke actuator into one actuator system. Since most long-stroke
movements are in a plane, this can be done by a contactless planar actuator.
The topology proposed and tested in this paper provides long-stroke contact
less energy transfer (CET) in a plane with only small changes in power transfer
capability.

ACTUATOR
Actuator is a mechanical device used for moving or controlling a mechanism or
system. It converts electrical signals into motion.
Here we are using a linear actuator; it converts electrical signals into linear
motion i.e. the movement is linear in manner along a plane.

CET TOPOLOGY
The design of the primary and secondary coil is optimized to get a coupling that is
as constant as possible for a sufficiently large area. This area should be large
enough to allow the secondary coil to move from one primary coil to the next one
without a large reduction in coupling. If this can be achieved, the power can be
transferred by one primary coil that is closest to the secondary coil. When the
secondary coil moves out of range the first primary coil is turned off and the next
one will be energized. To ensure a smooth energy transfer to the moving load, the
position dependence of the coupling should be minimized, while keeping the
coupling high enough to get a high-efficiency energy transfer.

A lot of systems use 2D spiral coils for the primary and secondary coil,
since the spiral coil geometry allows relatively high coupling (upto60%) and some
tolerance form is alignment of the coils. However, to allow the secondary coil to
move from one primary coil to the next, the tolerance for misalignments should be
increased. In the proposed system this is done by using a 3D geometry for the
primary coil. This results in a fairly constant B-field around the primary coil, which
accommodates good coupling in a large area. Further more, since the system is
supposed to transfer power to a load moving in a plane, it is convenient to use a
shape that is symmetrical in 2D for both the primary coil and the secondary coil:
a square for instance. The geometry of the primary and the secondary coils are
optimized with FEM using Maxwell 3D10 Optimetrics. The resulting geometry of
the coils is shown in Fig.1 and 2 and the dimensions are listed in Table 1
 The drawing in Fig.3 shows one secondary coil above nine primary coils.
The black square shows the area in which the center of the secondary coil can move
while maintaining good coupling with the middle primary coil. The secondary coil
is situated in the bottom-left corner of the area of interaction with the middle
primary coil. The coupling between the primary coil and the secondary coil within
that area is calculated with Maxwell 3D 10Optimetrics and measured. The results
are shown in Fig.4, which show that the FEM predictions are very close to the
measured values. The coupling K is fairly constant within most of the area, only on
the outer edges it drops fast. However, the ripple defined by Eq.1 is 25%, which is
quite small considering the large displacement of the secondary coil:
Ripple = max (k) - min (k) ·100% (1)
max (k)

Although this system is designed with square shaped coils, it is also possible to
design a system with similar characteristics using rectangular coils.
Surface fitted through measurement Surface fitted through FEM simulation

Fig 4. Coupling between primary and secondary

STEADY-STATE ELECTRIC CIRCUIT ANALYSIS

Since the system will be used in a maglev application based on

repulsive forces between coils and permanent magnets, the use of iron or ferrites is
prohibited. In addition, the use of cores will limit the stroke of the system.
Therefore, a coreless or air core inductive coupling is used to transfer the energy.
To keep the efficiency of an air core inductive coupling high a resonant capacitor is
used for both the primary and the secondary coil. Moreover, due to the position
dependent coupling, a series resonant capacitor is used for both coils to ensure that
the resonant frequency of the circuit does not depend on the coupling. The electric
circuit of the CET system is shown in Fig.5, where V 1 is the RMS voltage of the
power supply, I 1 is the RMS current supplied by the power supply, I 2 the RMS
current induced in the secondary circuit. C 1and C 2 are the series resonant
capacitors in the primary and secondary circuit, R 1 is the resistance of the primary
coil, R2 is the resistance of the secondary coil. L 1 and L 2 are the self inductance
of the primary and secondary coil, respectively. k is the inductive coupling factor
between the primary and secondary coil, and R L is the resistance of the load. The
load R L represents the rectifier and additional power electronics.
Simplified versions of the circuit are shown in Fig.6a and b, where Z R is the
reflected load of the secondary circuit on the primary circuit and Z 1is the load seen
by the power supply.
 EXPERIMENTAL SETUP

An experimental setup was built to test the CET design, which consists of an array
of three stationary primary coils that are fixed in a row on top of a ceramic
structure. The ceramic structure is used to allow heat from the coils to be conducted
to the iron base frame and at the same time to prevent eddy current losses in the iron
base frame. The primary coils are made of litz wire. Each bundle of litz wire
consists of 60 strands of 71 µm and the strands are wrapped together with a layer of
cotton. The strand size has been chosen after examining the AC losses. The turns of
the coil are fixed by glue that has been applied during the winding process.
Approximately 120 turn fitted in the cross-section, resulting in a 0.3 filling factor.
Each primary coil is connected in series with a resonance capacitor. Each resonant
circuit is driven by a separate half-bridge power supply that applies a square wave
voltage of 191 kHz over the resonant circuit. The schematic of the half-bridge
power supply is shown in Fig. 7. An overview of the primary coils and the
corresponding series capacitors is shown in Table II. The secondary coil is fixed
onto a ceramic plate that is bolted to the mover of a linear actuator. Again ceramic
material is used for heat conduction and the minimization of eddy current losses.
The linear actuator can move the secondary coil over the three primary coils. The
position of the secondary coil with respect to the array of primary coils is measured
by the encoder of the linear actuator. A picture of the experimental setup is shown
in Fig. 8.
 The secondary coil is connected in series with a resonant capacitor.
The circuit is then connected to a full-bridge diode rectifier to generate a DC output.
The DC output of the rectifier is connected to the load, which is an electromotor of
a CD drive running at 12 VDC as shown in Fig. 9.
All subsystems are connected to a ds1103 dSpace system running the
control program at 8 kHz. This way the DC bus voltage of the primary coil power
supplies is controlled as well as which of the primary coil power supplies is
enabled. The position of the linear actuator is controlled using a PID controller
running on the dSpace system. Depending on the position of the linear actuator the
dSpace system enables the primary coil that is completely overlapped by the
secondary coil.
The primary coil activation is controlled by a multi-port switch. The
multi-port switch has four active coil states; state1 enables the power supply of the
first primary coil, state 2 and 3 enable the power supply of the second and third
primary coil, respectively. State 4 disables all power supplies and this state is used
for switching from one power supply to the next. When the secondary coil moves
out of range of primary coil 1 (active coil state 1), the active supply is switched off
(active coil state 4) and one sample time later the second supply is switched on
(active coil state 2). For one sample time none of the power supplies is active
(active coil state 4), which is necessary to allow the triac in the power supply that is
switched off (see Fig. 7) to block the circuit after the current in the resonant circuit
is damped. There is no other control mechanism in the power electronics, and the
system operates without any measurement on the secondary site, except for the
position of the secondary coil
 BLOCK DIAGRAM

Secondary
coil

Half
bridge Primar
power y Coil 1
supply

Half
bridge Primar
power y Coil 2
supply

Half
bridge
power
Primar
supply
y Coil 3
wer
supply
Fig.8 Picture of experimental CET setup
SCHEMATIC DIAGRAM OF POWER SUPPLY
 RESULTS

An electromotor of a CD drive that runs on 12 VDC is connected to the

rectifier. The voltage and current from the DC bus supply as well as the voltage and
current to the CD drive are measured and shown in Fig. 10 and 11. The secondary
coil is moving over all three primary coils following a sinusoidal position reference,
which represents a total displacement of 18 cm (i.e. the amplitude of the sine wave
is 9 cm). The frequency of the sinusoidal position reference is 2 Hz, so in one
second the secondary coil makes two cycles (one cycle implies moving from
primary coil 1 over primary coil 2 to primary coil 3 and back). The cycle is clearly
visible from the Active Coil plot in Fig. 10 and 11, which represents the state of the
active coil multi-port switch. The secondary coil reaches a maximum speed of 1.1
m/s over the second primary coil. Due to this speed the secondary coil is in range of
the second primary coil for only 60 ms.
By calculating the RMS values of the voltages and currents
the power from the DC bus supply Pin as well as the power to the CD drive load
Pout and the efficiency η according to Eq. 14 can be calculated. This calculation
includes losses in the power electronics. The values are listed in Table III.
 In Fig. 12, the transient behavior is shown when the secondary coil is
moving from primary coil 1 to primary coil 2. It is clearly visible that all power
supplies are switched off when the active coil state has value 4. There is also some
delay between the active coil state switch and the response from the power
electronics, which is caused by a slow rising edge of the enable signal and by delay
in the power electronics. In Fig. 10 and 11 the switching is also visible in the
current waveforms, since no current is drawn from the DC bus supply and no
current is available for the electromotor of the CD drive.
The ripples visible in the voltage and current waveforms
from the DC bus power supply and to the CD drive are related to the changing
coupling. However, since the CD drive does not represent a purely resistive load,
the ripple is somewhat smoothed by the inductance of the load. This effect is more
visible when a purely resistive load will be connected to the system. In addition, the
CD drive does not need much power to operate and a resistive load can be operated
at higher power levels. Therefore, a 50 Ω resistive load is used at a higher power
level. The same trajectory is used for the secondary coil. The measured voltage and
current waveforms of the DC bus supply and the load are shown in Fig. 13 and 14
respectively. The RMS values of voltage, current and power as well as the
efficiency are shown in Table IV.
 The variation in coupling is now clearly visible in the current and
voltage waveforms of the load. This suggests that the power transfer can be further
smoothed by measuring the coupling and changing the voltage of the DC bus
supply accordingly. The results are very similar to the results of the CD drive.
Higher power levels have not been tested using the linear actuator, since the
capacitors in the resonant circuit cannot operate above 800 V. Operating at higher
power requires new capacitors which have not been realized yet. It is expected that
power transfer up to 300 W is feasible.
CONTACTLESS ENERGY TRANSFER

A Better Solution for a Mobile World

Talk to any plant engineer or production system designer and you’ll find that electrical
wiring is the bane of their existence. From installing the wires, to rewiring as
production lines need to be changed, to repairing damage caused by careless workers,
electrical wires represent an ongoing cost and risk for downtime in manufacturing
plants. Until recently, the miles of electrical wiring that snake around any
manufacturing facility, hanging down from ceilings and extending across corridors
between equipment, have been viewed as a necessary aspect of industrial automation.
But today industry is moving toward a wireless world. Like consumers with their cell
phones, laptops and PDA’s, industrial companies want wireless technologies that
improve versatility, reduce costs and maintain connectivity. One of the latest
developments to draw interest among engineering personnel is contactless energy
transfer for powering and controlling motors. While wireless communication is now
common in factories, wirelessly transferring 16kW of electricity through the air to
power equipment is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States.
 In a typical automated manufacturing environment, where carts full of parts
must be moved between the different stages of a production process, a contactless
system transfers electrical energy inductively from an insulated conductor in a fixed
installation to one or more mobile loads. Electromagnetic coupling is realized via an air
gap, so it is not subject to wear and costly maintenance. Contactless energy transfer
reduces costs in several ways: It eliminates festooning or overhanging utilities. The
underground wiring is compact and poses no trip hazards. There is no carriage to run
out on the shop floor. There are also no pits to be dug to drop in trailing utilities.
In addition to lower costs, a mobile system using contactless energy
transfer provides greater versatility: The contactless system enables more flexible track
layout with curves and switches, simple segmentation of tracks, which makes it easy to
extend a track or change travel directions, and higher speeds.
 APPLICATIONS

Contactless energy transfer is ideal for applications where:

• The mobile equipment has to cover long distances
• A variable, extendable track layout is required
• High speeds have to be achieved
• The energy transfer has to be maintenance free
•Additional environmental contaminants are not permitted in sensitive areas
• The operation takes place in wet and humid areas

Maintenance and ambient conditions are important factors in constructing systems

for material handling and transportation applications, such as automotive assembly,
storage and retrieval logistics and sorting. Typical applications that could benefit from
Contactless energy transfer includes:
• Overhead trolleys
• Conveyor trolleys
• Guided floor conveyors
• Push-skid conveyors
• Storage and retrieval units
• Pallet transportation systems
• Baggage handling
• Panel gantries
• Elevator equipment
• Amusement park rides
• Battery charging stations
 By replacing a drag-chain system in a conveyor trolley that transports and sorts
pallets, for example, contactless energy transfer enables pallets to transverse over
longer distances. Complicated holders for drag chains are eliminated, as is downtime
for repairing cable breaks and battery charging. Repairs for wear from bending or
torsion are also eliminated. The wear-free power supply in a contactless system has
many advantages in designing and maintaining push-skid conveyors used in automotive
assembly, for example, or in storage and retrieval units in a high-bay warehouse.
Because there is no conductor rail, there is no danger of introducing contaminants from
system leakages and no components that are difficult to reach for maintenance.
Problems with fitting the platforms into conveyor belts are also eliminated, since
there’s no need for high mechanical tolerances between the line cable and pick-up.
Perhaps the biggest advantage of a system based on contactless energy transfer
is higher system availability because the system is essentially maintenance free. In a
manufacturing environment where change is a constant and speed is an imperative, the
versatility, flexibility and reliability of contactless energy transfer systems can reduce
the wear-and-tear on plant engineers as well as equipment.
 CONCLUSION

A new topology for contact less energy transfer (CET) to a moving

load has been proposed, built and tested. The CET topology allows for a long-stroke
movement in a plane and a short-stroke movement of a few millimeters
perpendicular to the plane. In addition, it is tolerant to small rotations. The power
electronics consist of a half-bridge square wave power supply for each primary coil
and series resonant capacitor and a full-bridge diode rectifier at the load.
Power transfer up to 33 W with resistive load of 50 Ω has been
demonstrated The CET system was used to power a 3-phase brushless electromotor
of a CD drive and showed stable power transfer of 3.44 W. The power was
transferred at approximately 90 % efficiency, while the secondary coil was moving
with speeds up to 1.1 m/s over the primary coils
 REFERENCE

 Jeroen de Boeij, Student Member, IEEE

 www.wikepedia.com
 www.siemens.com
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