Finite Element Assisted Numerical Comparison of Single and Two Phase Inductively Coupled Power Transfer Systems

Inductively coupled power transfer systems (ICPT) are becoming ubiquitous in industry. Many such systems are excited with single or multi-phase input current. This leads to increased complexity in comparing such systems when solely using the magnetic frequency analysis. This paper utilizes modern finite element method analysis software to propose a novel software methodology for the numerical comparison of single and two phase ICPT systems as demonstrated on a three dimensional (3D) battery charging system. The sinusoidal magnetic frequency response of a single phase system is compared to the magnetic transient response of a multi-phase current system by use of a novel software methodology proposed in this paper. This consists of a transient response analysis to determine compute the resulting magnetic response over the duration of an input current period on the two phase system. The resulting non-sinusoidal response is then integrated over a whole period to extract the root-mean-square value for comparison with that of a single phase system across a 3D cubic power zone.