TMR-Sensor-Array-Based Misalignment-Tolerant Wireless Charging Technique for Roadway Electric Vehicles

The wirelessly transferred power as well as charging efficiency will significantly drop due to the large misalignment between the transmitting coil and receiving coil for roadway electric vehicles (EVs). A low-cost and reliable misalignment-tolerant wireless charging technique is indispensable for the rapid commercialization of wireless EV charging. This paper presents a technique to achieve the misalignment-tolerant wireless charging for the dynamic wireless charging (DWC) system by means of a tunneling magnetoresistive (TMR) sensor array as well as the easy-to-fabricate receiving coils. The TMR sensor array provides the coil-misalignment position by measuring the magnetic field component generated from the transmitting coil. The corresponding receiving coils are selected to be in resonance according to the measured coil-misalignment positions. In this paper, a sensor array composed of 29 uniaxial TMR sensors was utilized to measure the magnetic field component. This effectiveness of the proposed technique has been validated by both the finite-element method (FEM) simulations and laboratory experiments. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed misalignment-tolerant wireless charging system can operate in a relatively wide misalignment range of ±120 mm with charging efficiency higher than 76.2%.