148 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 51, NO.
1, FEBRUARY 2004
Power Transfer Capability and Bifurcation
Phenomena of Loosely Coupled Inductive
Power Transfer Systems
Chwei-Sen Wang, Grant A. Covic, Senior Member, IEEE, and Oskar H. Stielau
Abstract—Loosely coupled inductive power transfer (LCIPT)
systems are designed to deliver power efficiently from a stationary
primary source to one or more movable secondary loads over rel-
atively large air gaps via magnetic coupling. In this paper, a gen-
eral approach is presented to identify the power transfer capability
and bifurcation phenomena (multiple operating modes) for such
systems. This is achieved using a high order mathematical model
consisting of both primary and secondary resonant circuits. The
primary compensation is deliberately designed to make the pri-
mary zero phase angle frequency equal the secondary resonant fre-
quency to achieve maximum power with minimum VA rating of the
supply. A contactless electric vehicle battery charger was used to
validate the theory by comparing the measured and calculated op-
erational frequency and power transfer. For bifurcation-free oper-
ation, the power transfer capability and controllability are assured
by following the proposed bifurcation criteria. Where controllable
operation within the bifurcation region is achievable, a significant
increase in power is possible.
Index Terms—Bifurcation, compensation, electromagnetic cou-
pling, inductive power transfer.
I. INTRODUCTION
T HE magnetic field has been widely used for the transfer of
power or information. Traditionally, good coupling is fun-
damental for effective transfer of significant amounts of power
such as in transformers and induction motors. Recently, de-
velopments in modern power electronics have enabled many
new loosely coupled applications such as contactless battery
charging across large air gaps [1]–[3]. Other examples include
material handling systems [4]–[6] and people movers [7], where
the secondary systems are electrically isolated and move along a
long track. Electrical isolation is essential for power supplies in
harsh environments such as mining and outdoor systems. The
advantages of such loosely coupled inductive power transfer
(LCIPT) systems are reliability and low maintenance.
An LCIPT system may be envisaged as shown in Fig. 1. It
consists of two independent mutually coupled electrical sys-
tems. The primary (stationary) part produces an essentially con-
stant current in the track or coil inductance using a suit-
Manuscript received July 15, 2002; revised June 11, 2003. Abstract published
on the Internet November 26, 2003. This work was supported in part by the
Foundation of Research, Science and Technology (FRST), New Zealand.
C.-S. Wang and G. A. Covic are with the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
(e-mail: ga.covic@auckland.ac.nz).
O. H. Stielau was with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engi-
neering, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. He is now at
152B Forrest Hill Road, Forrest Hill, Auckland, New Zealand.
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0278-0046/04$20.00 © 2004 IEEE
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Fig. 1. Structure of LCIPT system.
able resonant high frequency switching power supply with pri-
mary compensation to minimize the VA rating of the supply.
The pickup (secondary) can move with respect to the track.
Here compensation is also often required, to enhance the power
transfer capability. A switched mode controller is normally used
to control the power flow from the pickup coil to the load. In
more complex systems a number of individual pickups can exist,
supplied by a single primary.
The power supply and controller normally control both the
frequency and the primary current to achieve maximum power
transfer capability to the load. Both fixed- and variable-fre-
quency control can be used. Fixed frequency controllers are
much simpler, but increase the required VA rating of the
power supply. Variable-frequency controllers ideally operate
at the zero phase angle point of the load impedance seen by
the power supply in order to minimize the VA rating of the
supply. However, the ideal control point becomes difficult to
determine if more than one zero phase angle condition exists in
the frequency spectrum, as can occur as the load is increased.
If a variable-frequency controller can not deal with uncer-
tainty in the bifurcation region, the operational frequency of
the power supply will either drift away from the desired oper-
ating position or move unstably between several undesirable op-
erating conditions. Consequently, the power transfer capability
will drop significantly. To date, some analysis has been under-
taken to determine the bifurcation criterion for selected topolo-
gies and applied to particular applications [2], [4], [8], but no
general criterion has been found.
Without a thorough theoretical analysis of the interactions be-
tween the primary and secondary subsystems, it is usually quite
difficult to achieve good designs of the LCIPT system. For ex-
ample, many designs calculate the primary capacitance by com-
pensating only the primary self-inductance [5], [6], [9]. This is
acceptable if the reflected impedance is negligible in compar-
ison to the primary self-inductance. Moreover, bifurcation-free
operation is normally assumed.
In this paper, a general analysis is proposed for the design
of LCIPT systems using the load model as seen by the power
WANG et al.: POWER TRANSFER CAPABILITY AND BIFURCATION PHENOMENA OF LCIPT SYSTEMS 149

Using a standard mutual inductance coupling transformer

model and assuming sinusoidal voltages and currents [4], [8],
the induced voltage in the secondary due to the primary current
is equal to , while the reflected voltage in the primary
due to the secondary current is equal to , with M
the mutual inductance between the primary and secondary and
the operational frequency. The circuit in Fig. 2(b) represents
this coupling model.

III. POWER TRANSFER CAPABILITY

The power transfer capability of LCIPT system can be deter-
mined using an identical approach to that developed in [4]. Here,
the load impedance of the secondary is calculated as a lumped
impedance whose value depends on the secondary com-
pensation as given by
series compensated secondary
parallel compensated secondary.
(1)
The loading effect of the secondary on the primary circuit
is shown in Fig. 2(c) as a reflected impedance . This
impedance is dependent on the transformer coupling and
operating frequency, and is given by

Fig. 2. Topology and modeling. (a) Basic topologies. (b) Equivalent coupling
(2)
circuit. (c) Primary circuits with reflected impedance.
Substituting (1) into (2), the reflected resistance and reactance
can be derived as
supply. This high order mathematical model combines both the
primary and secondary subsystems. The theory is developed series compensated
with the assumptions of sinusoidal voltages and currents under secondary
steady-state conditions. Moreover, the primary capacitance parallel compensated
is deliberately designed to compensate both the primary secondary
self-inductance and the reflected impedance. This forces the (3)
zero phase angle frequency of the load model to equal the and
secondary resonant frequency. At this operating condition,
maximum power transfer is achieved with minimum VA rating
of the power supply. Normalization of the system parameters series compensated
is employed to achieve a general description of various LCIPT secondary
(4)
systems enabling general bifurcation criteria to be determined parallel compensated
for variable frequency controllers operating under zero phase
secondary
angle control. The theory is then applied to the design of a
contactless electric vehicle battery charger. Finally, the power where the operators “ ” and “ ” represent the real and imag-
transfer capability and bifurcation phenomena of the proposed inary components of the corresponding variable, respectively.
design are identified and verified practically using a suitable The power transferred from the primary to the secondary is
experimental rig. then simply the reflected resistance multiplied by the square of
the primary current as given by
II. TOPOLOGIES (5)
Four basic topologies labeled as SS, SP, PP, and PS for LCIPT There is theoretically no limit to the power transfer capability
systems are shown in Fig. 2(a), where the first S or P stands for if the system is operated at the secondary resonant frequency
series or parallel compensation of the primary winding and the given by
second S or P stands for series or parallel compensation of the
secondary winding. The subscripts “p” and “s” stand for the pri- (6)
mary and secondary respectively, while the resistance R repre-
sents the load on the secondary. In practice, a rectifier, filter and
The reflected resistance at this secondary resonant frequency
switched-mode controller is normally used to drive the load that
can be calculated from (3) using
may be inductive or capacitive. However, it is usual to represent
this load as an equivalent resistance. (7)
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150
TABLE I
PARAMETERS DEFINED AT !
The result of (7) is shown as in Table I(a) for both
series and parallel-compensated secondary systems. It can be
shown that both the reflected resistance and the power transfer
capability assuming constant primary current for series compen-
sation increase to infinity when the load is reduced to zero.
A similar result arises for parallel-compensated systems as the
load increases to infinity.
The reflected reactance at this frequency can be calculated
similarly from (4) and is shown as for each topology
in Table I(a). As can be seen, a series compensated secondary
has zero reflected reactance, whereas a parallel-compensated
system reflects a capacitive load. This is one of the major
differences between series and parallel-compensated secondary
systems.
IV. LOAD MODEL
The primary and secondary resonant circuits present a sen-
sitive load to the power supply. Investigating such load char-
acteristics precisely is crucial to ensure power transfer capa-
bility and controllability. This is achievable by modeling the
load impedance seen by the power supply. With the loading ef-
fect of the secondary modeled by a reflected impedance as
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 51, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2004
described in Section III, the load impedance seen by the
power supply is
series compensated primary
parallel compensated primary.
(8)
The real part of the load impedance is the load resis-
tance representing the real power transfer, while the imaginary
part is the load reactance indicating the reactive power
flow. In order to minimize the VA ratings of the power supply, it
is desirable to operate at the zero phase angle frequency of the
load impedance. At this frequency, the load reactance seen by
the power supply is zero, eliminating reactive power flow. This
zero phase angle frequency must be designed to equal the sec-
ondary resonant frequency to ensure maximum power transfer
meets the required power. To achieve these objectives, a new
approach is proposed in this paper. Here the primary capaci-
tance is selected to compensate both the primary self-inductance
and the reflected impedance. The design solutions are given in
Table I(b) for the four basic topologies in Fig. 1(a). They are
calculated using
(9)
As shown, the required primary compensation capacitance is
independent of the load if the primary is series compensated (SS
and SP topologies). For parallel-compensated primary (PP and
PS topologies), the required primary compensation capacitance
is a function of the load. In this case, the primary compensation
capacitance must be designed for the required power because it
is impractical to allow the primary compensation capacitance to
vary with the load.
V. NORMALIZATION
To facilitate the design of LCIPT systems a general anal-
ysis is achieved by normalizing the load model described by
(8) using the reflected resistance at the secondary resonant fre-
quency given in Table I(a). In this process, both the frequency
and the load impedance are normalized.
The operating frequency is normalized using from (6)
as
(10)
The load impedance is normalized in terms of
from (7) as
(11)
This definition is suitable for series compensated primary
systems, however it is often much easier to describe the load
impedance in terms of its admittance value (conductance and
WANG et al.: POWER TRANSFER CAPABILITY AND BIFURCATION PHENOMENA OF LCIPT SYSTEMS
susceptance) when dealing with parallel compensated primary
systems so that
(12)
Substituting (8) into (11), the normalized load resistance and
reactance for series compensated primary systems are given by
(13)
and
(14)
Substituting (8) into (12), the normalized load conductance
and susceptance for parallel-compensated primary systems are
derived as
(15)
and
(16)
As shown above, for a series-compensated primary the load
resistance is identical to the reflected resistance. The load reac-
tance, however, depends on the primary capacitance and induc-
tance, and also the reflected reactance.
For a parallel-compensated primary the load conductance de-
pends on the primary inductance, and also the reflected resis-
tance and reactance, while the load susceptance depends on the
primary capacitance and inductance as well as the reflected re-
sistance and reactance.
Equations (13)–(16) can be simplified if they are written in
terms of u, and the quality factors ( and ) associated to the
primary and secondary resonant circuits. These quality factors
are defined as the ratio of reactive to real power described in [4]
and [8], and calculated at the secondary resonant frequency ,
so that
(17)
where and are the primary and secondary reactive
powers respectively.
Table I(c) specifies the resulting values of and .
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151
TABLE II
NORMALIZED FUNCTIONS IN (13)–(16)
Table II shows the result of this simplification process for
each term in (13)–(16). A complete derivation is provided in
the Appendix for the SS topology. All other topologies follow
an identical approach.
VI. BIFURCATION
To illustrate the phenomenon of bifurcation, the PP topology
was chosen. This topology is also used for the example dis-
cussed in Section VII, so that theoretical and practical results
can be compared easily. Similar characteristics can be found for
the other three basic topologies.
The imaginary component of the normalized load admittance
given by (16) is shown in Fig. 3 as a function of and u, with
assumed to be 5, which is a typical design choice for LCIPT
systems [4], [8]. Similar graphs can be drawn for other values of
. It can be seen that the zero phase angle frequency is unique
and equal to the secondary resonant frequency only when the
primary quality factor is much higher than the secondary quality
factor. However, there are three zero phase angle frequencies
if the primary quality factor is much lower than the secondary
quality factor.
When designing LCIPT systems, it is desirable to determine
the boundary where bifurcation occurs such that the power
transfer capability and the bifurcation phenomena can be
identified for both bifurcation-free and bifurcation-allowed
operations. This is useful when designing the controller. If bi-
furcation-free operation is desired, the controller must operate
152 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 51, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2004

TABLE IV
BIFURCATION CRITERIA

where and are functions of , ,

and as defined in Table III(a) and (b) and (19), below. For
clarity, a complete example derivation of these terms for an SS
topology is given in the Appendix.
As expected, the value of (18) is zero at the secondary res-
Fig. 3. Example of the normalized load susceptance (PP topology with Q = onant frequency corresponding to zero phase angle.
5). As shown in Table III(a), the function associ-
ated to each of the four basic topologies is always positive.
TABLE III To ensure the secondary resonant frequency is the only zero
NORMALIZED FUNCTIONS IN (18) phase angle frequency, the function in (18) must
be greater than zero. For the four basic topologies, the function
is a polynomial of the form
(19)
and the nonzero coefficients in (19) are given in Table III(b) for
the four basic topologies. As shown in this table,
is a biquadratic polynomial for SS and SP topologies. For PP
and PS topologies, is a bi-quartic polynomial.
Normally, both the primary and secondary quality factors are
larger than unity. This makes the polynomial coefficient for
the SS and SP topologies positive so that if the biquadratic poly-
nomial is to be greater than zero, the discriminant
(20)
must be less than zero. The necessary criteria for achieving a
single zero phase angle frequency for the SS and SP topologies
derived from this condition are given in Table IV, and an
example derivation is provided for the SS topology in the
Appendix.
The solution for the PP and PS topologies require the
bi-quartic polynomial to be greater than zero and can be
solved by the approach proposed by Ludovico Ferrari in the
16th century [10], but is rather complicated and cumbersome.
Alternatively, a numerical methodology can be used. Here,
an iteration process is used over a practical range of from
1 to 10 and a suitable frequency range of around unity. In
practical designs, is normally larger than to ensure
bifurcation free operation [4], [8]. The numerical process starts
within the bifurcation boundary. If the system is allowed to from a significantly large to make positive
operate in the bifurcation region, the controller must be able to across the frequency spectrum, and then reduces by a small
operate at the desired operating mode. amount at each iteration step to verify whether
The necessary criteria to ensure a unique zero phase angle intersects with the axis , where bifurcation
frequency for each topology can be determined by rearranging occurs. The numerical bifurcation boundary of the PP topology
(14) and (16) to give is then verified against the bifurcation criterion in Table IV. For
the PS topology, is positive across the frequency
spectrum if is larger than and, as such, no bifurcation
(18)
occurs under this condition.
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WANG et al.: POWER TRANSFER CAPABILITY AND BIFURCATION PHENOMENA OF LCIPT SYSTEMS
Fig. 4. Electromagnetic structure of the contactless charger.
VII. VALIDATION
A contactless electric vehicle battery charging system having
a PP topology was designed using the design methodology pro-
posed in [8] in order to validate the theory. This PP topology
was chosen since it is commonly used for high-power industrial
applications [4]. The current source characteristic of the par-
allel-compensated secondary is well suited for battery charging,
whereas the parallel-compensated primary is used to generate a
large primary current [8]. Using this approach it is expected that
the designed system will deliver rated power without exhibiting
bifurcation, although (if the design parameters are all maxi-
mized which ideally results in the lowest cost system) only a
small safety margin will exist between this rated operating con-
dition and the onset of bifurcation. The electromagnetic struc-
ture of this system is given in Fig. 4. Here the primary and sec-
ondary windings are identical, each having concentrated coils
with a magnetic linking path. It is assumed that the secondary
winding is attached to the underside of an electric vehicle, while
the primary winding is buried in the ground. Once an electric
vehicle has stopped over the charging station, electric power is
transferred to the vehicle across an air gap via magnetic coupling
between the primary coil in the ground and secondary coil on
the vehicle. This system was designed to deliver 30 kW across a
45-mm air gap at a nominal frequency of 20 kHz with a primary
current of 150 A.
As described in Section III, there is theoretically no limit
to the power transfer capability of a given coupling structure
and compensation topology if the system is operated at the
secondary resonant frequency. According to the description
in Section IV, the primary compensation capacitance can
be deliberately designed to make the operational frequency
(primary zero phase angle frequency) equal the secondary
resonant frequency for any specified power requirement.
Theoretically, this capacitance (in the PP topology) is load
dependent, but in practice, it must be fixed at some suitable
value. Consequently, the operating and secondary resonant
frequencies can not be equal for all operating loads and thus
the available power is limited. Moreover, bifurcation emerges
as the system power demand increases, since while reduces
with increasing load, actually increases and this ensures
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153
TABLE V
PARAMETERS OF THE CONTACTLESS BATTERY CHARGER
that the criteria of Table IV will eventually not be satisfied. It
is therefore necessary to identify the power transfer capability
and bifurcation phenomena in every system.
The measured coupling and compensation parameters, along
with other key system parameters used for the above design, are
given in Table V. The primary and secondary quality factors
and are calculated at rated load from Table I(c) as 2.51 and
1.96, respectively. The bifurcation boundary given by Table IV
as is 2.47. Since the calculated is very
close to, but slightly above this critical boundary, the system
should not bifurcate for all normal operating loads, up to and
including rated operation.
The system is assumed to operate at the primary zero phase
angle frequencies calculated by
(21)
These zero phase angle frequencies are shown as functions
of the load in Fig. 5(a). The power transfer capability when op-
erated at each zero phase angle frequency and load can be cal-
culated from (5) and are shown in Fig. 5(b). Here, the curve
represents operation at the lowest zero phase angle frequency,
while curves and represent operation at higher zero phase
angle frequencies, respectively. The power curves were calcu-
lated assuming the primary current was controlled at 15 A in-
stead of the rated value of 150 A for practical reasons, as this
enables the theoretical curves to be verified in the laboratory.
Although the primary current is reduced, all the system char-
acteristics presented are identical except that the power level is
scaled down by one-hundredth.
As part of the experimental setup, a voltage-fed full-bridge
parallel-resonant inverter with a variable-frequency controller
was used to drive the designed system. Zero phase angle oper-
ation was achieved by controlling the inverter current to follow
the voltage across the parallel-compensated primary winding.
The measured frequencies and power transfers are shown in
the Fig. 5 (and in corresponding figures) as circles at each of
the measured loads. In the bifurcation region, control perturba-
tions and transients within the system affect the operational fre-
quency. In order to investigate and measure the system operating
at different frequency modes, the turn-on interval of the inverter
was adjusted manually to force a shift between these operating
modes. Under steady-state conditions the system was found to
operate stably at either the lowest or highest zero phase angle
154
(a)
(b)
Fig. 5. Measured and calculated frequency and power (C = 2:21
(a) Zero phase angle frequency. (b) Power transfer capability.
frequency ( or ), whereas stable operation at the middle fre-
quency is not feasible without forcing the frequency (which
was not possible with the controller used).
As shown in Fig. 5 the measured results closely follow the
theoretical curves despite simplifications in the model that as-
sumes sinusoidal voltages and currents, and ignores losses in the
capacitors and inductors.
When the system is operated at its design frequency (where
is unity) as shown in Fig. 5(a) and (b) the available power is
328 W, which as expected is close to the rated value of 300 W.
Because the power transfer capability depends on both the op-
erational frequency and the load resistance, the theoretical max-
imum power achievable for bifurcation-free operation is 340 W
at a slightly higher load where the operational frequency is lower
than the “desired” frequency. As expected from the design ap-
proach discussed earlier, the onset of bifurcation occurs at a load
of 7.2 very close to (but slightly above) rated load of 6.5
as shown by the dotted lines. Fig. 5(b) also clearly shows why
a variable frequency power controller requires a safety margin
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 51, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2004
(a)
(b)
F). Fig. 6. Measured and calculated frequency and power (C = 2:38 F).
(a) Zero phase angle frequency. (b) Power transfer capability.
to ensure bifurcation-free operation over all practical power de-
mands. The safety margin of this design is 10% above the rated
load. Once such a controller begins to operate within the bifur-
cation region, the potential power delivery is significantly less if
the controller chooses to operate at compared with . How-
ever, assuming a suitable controller could be designed to predict
the operating modes and control the frequency, then even greater
power delivery is possible once bifurcation has occurred by con-
trolling the frequency to operate at when the predicted power
from Fig. 5(b) is determined to be higher than that found at the
other possible operating frequencies and . Using the ex-
ample given, the controller must operate at when the load is
less than 9 , and be forced to operate at for all higher loads.
The maximum available power under such operation can be as
high as 365 W.
In order to further verify the theory presented in this paper, the
system design was deliberately changed to be either well within
or far outside the bifurcation boundary (as calculated at the sec-
ondary resonant frequency where equals unity). One simple
WANG et al.: POWER TRANSFER CAPABILITY AND BIFURCATION PHENOMENA OF LCIPT SYSTEMS
(a)
(b)
Fig. 7. Measured and calculated frequency and power (C = 1:87
(a) Zero phase angle frequency. (b) Power transfer capability.
way to do this is by changing the primary compensation capaci-
tance. The measured and calculated operational frequencies and
power transfers with varying load are shown in Figs. 6 and 7. In
Fig. 6 the primary compensation capacitance was increased to
2.38 F with the expectation that the system would have a much
higher safety margin between its maximum power level and the
on-set of bifurcation, but that the power levels would be lower
than that achievable in Fig. 5. In Fig. 7 the primary capacitance
was decreased to 1.87 F and the system is expected to exhibit
bifurcation within the operating load range. Again, measured
and calculated values are seen to agree within practical limita-
tions. The resulting system of Fig. 7 is undesirable. While good
power transfer capability is possible in the bifurcation region
assuming a controller could be designed to utilize this, the dis-
advantage is the relatively low power transfer capability in the
bifurcation-free region, where the controller is forced to operate
at .
From the three examples, it can be observed for bifurca-
tion-free operation that power transfer is maximized by a design
where the operating point is close to but within the bifurcation
boundary.
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155
VIII. CONCLUSION
This paper has developed an analytical procedure for the de-
sign and control of the LCIPT systems operating at or near zero
phase angles between the primary input voltage and current.
At this operating condition, the voltage and current ratings of
the power supply are minimized and so is the cost. It is found
that there is theoretically no limit to the power transfer capa-
bility of a given electromagnetic coupling structure and com-
pensation topology if the system is operated at the secondary
resonant frequency. Therefore, a new approach is proposed to
achieve these objectives. Here, the primary compensation ca-
pacitance is deliberately designed to make the operational fre-
quency (primary zero phase angle frequency) equal the sec-
ondary resonant frequency and as such in theory is able to
meet any power transfer requirement without physical changes
to the coupling structure and compensation topology. The re-
quired primary compensation capacitance is found to be inde-
pendent of the load if the primary is series compensated. When
the primary is parallel compensated, the required primary com-
pensation capacitance is a function of the load. In this case, the
primary compensation capacitance must be designed for the re-
quired power since it is impractical to allow the primary com-
pensation capacitance to vary with the load. Moreover, mul-
tiple operating modes (bifurcation) emerge as the power de-
mand is increased. General bifurcation criteria are developed
to identify the power transfer capability and this bifurcation
phenomenon, and can be used to facilitate the design of the
controller. For bifurcation-free operation, the controller must
be designed to operate within the bifurcation boundary. If the
system is allowed to operate in the bifurcation region, the con-
troller must be capable of predicting and forcing operation at
the desired operating mode. A contactless electric vehicle bat-
tery charger with a variable frequency controller was used to
validate the theory. The proposed theory was verified by com-
F). paring the measured and calculated operational frequency and
power transfer using a 300-W test system.
APPENDIX
The normalized functions and the bifurcation criterion are de-
rived in this appendix for the SS topology. All other topologies
follow an identical approach.
The reflected resistance at the secondary resonant frequency
as shown in Table I(a) is
(A1)
Dividing (3) by (A1) results in
(A2)
Substituting (10) into (A2) results in
(A3)
156 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 51, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2004

(A16)

According to (6), the secondary capacitive reactance equals Letting (A17) be less than zero results in
the secondary inductive reactance and as such the secondary
quality factor given in Table I(c) can be represented as (A18)

(A4) The bifurcation criterion for SS topology derived from (A18)

is then
Substituting (A4) into (A3) results in

(A5) (A19)

Dividing (4) by (A1) results in

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(A6)
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The following equation is derived from (A1): robots,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 27, pp. 872–875, Sept./Oct.
1991.
[6] A. W. Green and J. T. Boys, “An inductively coupled high frequency
(A9) power system for material handling applications,” in Proc. Int. Power
Electronics Conf., vol. 2, Singapore, 1993, pp. 821–826.
Substituting (10) into (A9) results in [7] G. A. Covic, G. Elliott, O. H. Stielau, R. M. Green, and J. T. Boys,
“The design of a contact-less energy transfer system for a people mover
(A10) system,” in Proc. Int. Conf. Power System Technology, vol. 1, Dec. 2000,
pp. 79–84.
[8] O. H. Stielau and G. A. Covic, “Design of loosely coupled inductive
The primary quality factor given in Table I(c) can also be power transfer systems,” in Proc. 2000 Int. Conf. Power System Tech-
represented as nology, vol. 1, Dec. 2000, pp. 85–90.
[9] T. Bieler, M. Perrottet, V. Nguyen, and Y. Perriard, “Contactless power
(A11) and information transmission,” in Conf. Rec. IEEE-IAS Annu. Meeting,
vol. 1, 2001, pp. 83–88.
[10] J. Gullberg, Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers. New York:
Substituting (A11) into (A10) results in Norton, 1997, pp. 320–324.

(A12)

The following equation is also derived from (A1):

Chwei-Sen Wang received the B.E. degree in
(A13) mechanical engineering from National Chiao Tung
University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C., the M.E.
degree in mechanical engineering from National
Substituting (10) into (A13) results in Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C., and
the M.E. Hons. degree in electrical and electronic
(A14) engineering from The University of Auckland,
Auckland, New Zealand.
Substituting (A11) into (A14) results in He is currently a Doctoral Fellow with the
Foundation of Research, Science and Technology,
(A15) New Zealand, while hosted in the Department of
Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Auckland. He has
been a Research Fellow in the Mechanical Industry Research Laboratory
Substituting (A8), (A12) and (A15) into (14) results in (A16), of the Industrial Technology Research Institute, Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C.,
as shown at the top of the page. a Lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at National Chiao
The discriminant given in (20) is then Tung University, and a Project Manager with Rechi Precision Company
Ltd., Hsinchu, Taiwan, R.O.C. His research area covers automatic production
systems, computer graphics, CAD/CAM, refrigerant compressors, room
air conditioners, power electronics, and inductively coupled power transfer
(A17) systems.
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WANG et al.: POWER TRANSFER CAPABILITY AND BIFURCATION PHENOMENA OF LCIPT SYSTEMS
Grant A. Covic (M’88–SM’04) received the B.E.
Hons. and Ph.D. degrees from The University of
Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand, in 1986 and
1993, respectively,
He is a full-time Senior Lecturer in the Department
of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The Uni-
versity of Auckland. His current research interests in-
clude power electronics, ac motor control, electric ve-
hicle battery charging, and inductive power transfer.
He has consulted widely to industry in these areas.
He also has a strong interest in improved delivery
methods for electronics and control teaching
Dr. Covic received the John Hopkinson Premium Award from the Institution
of Electrical Engineers, U.K., in 1999.
Authorized licensed use limited to: CAMBRIDGE UNIV. Downloaded on March 02,2024 at 20:35:02 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
157
Oskar H. Stielau received the B.Eng., M.Eng., and
D.Eng. degrees from Rand Afrikaans University,
Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1986, 1988, and
1991, respectively.
He currently consults in the high-frequency
power electronic field specializing in inductive
technologies. Prior to that, he spent two years with
the Inductive Power Transfer research group at the
University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand,
and also seven years working in industry, mainly in
the induction heating field.