Dynamic Capacitive Wireless Power Transfer System for Electric Vehicles: Cooperative Research and Development Final Report, CRADA Number CRD-12-00480 (Project 9)

Road transportation accounts for 23% of our nation's total energy consumption, 59% of our petroleum consumption and 22% of our total emissions. Electric vehicles (EVs) have much higher well-to-wheel efficiency compared to gasoline vehicles and can reduce our dependence on oil, minimize emissions, improve local air quality and provide a platform for technological innovation and economic growth. While major progress has been made in the development of electric vehicles, their penetration remains under 1 The main hurdles in their widespread adoption are high cost, limited range and long charging times, due to limitations in battery technology. An approach to overcome these hurdles is to substantially reduce the on-board energy storage and instead deliver power wirelessly to the vehicle while it is in motion dynamic wireless power transfer (WPT). For EV charging applications, researchers have traditionally focused on inductive WPT. An issue with inductive WPT systems is that for magnetic flux guidance and shielding, they require ferrite cores, making them expensive, bulky and difficult to embed in the roadway. Under an ARPA-E IDEAS grant, the CU Boulder team has recently developed an alternative approach to WPT based on capacitive coupling that is much smaller, lighter, less expensive, and easier to embed in the roadway than inductive WPT; and have demonstrated a 1.2-kW 6.78-MHz version of this capacitive WPT system on a stationary platform. Under this seed grant program, preliminary work will be carried out on a dynamic capacitive WPT system to prepare a strong proposal for the ARPA-E OPEN 2018 FOA.