Investigation of Scale Conversion for Inductive Power Transfer in Series-Series Configuration

Nowadays, inductive wireless power transfer is widely used in various applications over a large power range. However, for high power systems, testing the magnetic coupler implementation often requires too much time, space, and expense for normal laboratory conditions. For such a reason, a miniaturized system is a viable alternative to the actual system for a preliminary test of transfer characteristics and control strategy before constructing the full-scaled system. This paper studies the scale conversion rules required for miniaturized coupler design to ensure the scaled and original systems are as equivalent as possible to each other in terms of transfer characteristics. To verify the proposed theory, a 1:15 scaled magnetic coupler was constructed, and its transfer characteristics were compared with the original system. The proposed scaling rules were tested by experiment, and the results agree well with the theoretical analysis and simulation.