Improved Efficiency of Two‐Stage Partial Power Processing Architectures for Inductive Power Transfer

ABSTRACT Inductive power transfer (IPT) technology has found widespread applications across various fields. As demand for IPT systems increases, single‐stage IPT systems are gradually becoming inadequate to meet the increasing requirements. Therefore, two‐stage IPT systems that incorporate front‐end or rear‐end DC/DC converter have been developed. However, the DC/DC converter in these cascaded two‐stage IPT systems introduce considerable energy losses. This paper aims to mitigate the energy losses by building several high efficiency two‐stage IPT system with proposed partial power processing feature. The paper first presents the proposed overall structure, followed by the development of an equivalent circuit model and a detailed power analysis. Subsequently, simulation and experimental results are provided to validate the performance of the proposed system. Under a 40 V input and 120 W output, the system achieves a maximum efficiency of 90.52%. It is then extended to a high‐power scenario, where, with a 100 V input and 500 W output, the maximum efficiency reaches 95.29%. Compared to conventional two‐stage IPT systems, the proposed system only processes partial power through the DC/DC converter, and hence offers reduced losses and diminished stresses on components. Therefore, a more compact design with enhanced power density and reduced overall system cost can be achieved.