An Overview of Resonant Circuits for Wireless Power Transfer

With ever-increasing concerns for the safety and convenience of the power supply, there is a fast growing interest in wireless power transfer (WPT) for industrial devices, consumer electronics, and electric vehicles (EVs). As the resonant circuit is one of the cores of both the near-field and far-field WPT systems, it is a pressing need for researchers to develop a high-efficiency high-frequency resonant circuit, especially for the mid-range near-field WPT system. In this paper, an overview of resonant circuits for the near-field WPT system is presented, with emphasis on the non-resonant converters with a resonant tank and resonant inverters with a resonant tank as well as compensation networks and selective resonant circuits. Moreover, some key issues including the zero-voltage switching, zero-voltage derivative switching and total harmonic distortion are addressed. With the increasing usage of wireless charging for EVs, bidirectional resonant inverters for WPT based vehicle-to-grid systems are elaborated.