Effect of Surrounding Conductive Object on Four-Plate Capacitive Power Transfer System

In this paper, the effect of a surrounding conductive object on a typical capacitive power transfer (CPT) system with two pairs of parallel plates is studied by considering the mutual coupling between the conductive object and the plates. A mathematical model is established based on a 5*5 mutual capacitance matrix by using a larger additional conductive plate to represent the surrounding conductive object. Based on the proposed model, the effect of the additional conductive plate on the CPT system is analyzed in detail. The electric field distribution of the CPT system including the additional plate is simulated by ANSYS Maxwell. A practical CPT system consisting of four 100mm*100mm square aluminum plates and one 300mm*300mm square aluminum plate is built to verify the modeling and analysis. Both theoretical and experimental results show that the output voltage of the CPT system decreases when the additional conductive plate is placed closer to the CPT system. It has found that the additional plate can effectively shield the electric field outside the plate, and it attracts the electric field in-between the four plates of the CPT system and the additional plate. It has also found that the voltage potential difference between the additional plate and the reference plate of the CPT system remains almost constant even when the distance between them changes. The findings are useful for guiding the design of CPT systems, particularly the electric field shielding.