Towards new infrastructure materials for on-the-road charging

Abstract

Abstract-As a future-oriented industry, the electrified mobility has the potential to enhance the sustainability of our road transportation sector radically. With the aim to break the EV batteries' bottleneck (e.g., cost, range anxiety, long waiting time) by focusing not on the battery but on the solution to charge it conveniently, different on-the-road-charging solutions have been found under active investigation. From a road infrastructure perspective, however, little attention has been given to the practical, physical roads where these charging solutions will be enabled. In reality, good performance of E-Road infrastructure in aspects such as robustness, durability, costeffectiveness will be crucial for the final success. Taking the Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) charging solution in a dynamic way as a basis, this paper mainly discusses about the physical infrastructural aspect i.e. the road infrastructural materials and the changed construction and maintenance principles. The paper aims to give developers in this field more awareness of the necessity and potential cross-coupling benefits from interdisciplinary collaboration, by taking the road infrastructure research into the concept development of E-Roads.

A Review of Power Transfer Systems for Light Rail Vehicles: The Case for Capacitive Wireless Power Transfer

“…To ensure a fair comparison of true capability, technologies developed at a similar scale to those in the CPT research were examined. For instance, [37] is one such large-scale case; by utilising a 128-m transmitter, this system achieved 818 kW transfer at 82.7% efficiency using a standard "road and pickups" IPT implementation [55]. Another such industry-scale case is found in [56], where a 50-kW IPT system was tested under real tramway conditions using a mockup tram, achieving 88% efficiency even with 1000 mm misalignment in the travelling direction.…”

“…While the IPT system is capable of high-power transfer with high efficiency, it is sensitive to metal and conductive objects or debris in the air gap [55]. This causes eddy current generation on nearby metal objects [33,55], resulting in the generation of significant heat, which can cause serious safety risks and fire hazards. The key safety indicator for IPT systems limits exposure to magnetic fields [69] to a safe maximum of 205 µT (IEEE) [70] and 27 µT (ICNIRP) [71][72][73].…”