Static Heat Exchanger for the Wireless Charging of Electric Vehicles

The USU College of Engineering partnered with the Aspire NSF Engineering Research Center to develop wireless charging pads for electric vehicles. These concrete pads, when placed in roadways, charge the batteries of electric vehicles that pass over them. As the pads charge vehicles, they produce excessive thermal energy (heat), which dissipates slowly through the surrounding concrete. This excess heat reduces the efficiency of the charging apparatus and can damage the imbedded electrical components. To manage the pad temperatures, the USU Nanoscale Thermal Energy Lab proposed to submerge the heat-generating elements in a Phase Change Material (PCM). As a solid, a PCM absorbs excess heat while maintaining the pad\u27s optimal operation temperature. As the PCM absorbs energy, it melts and begins to heat up. PCMs don\u27t absorb thermal energy evenly throughout their volume; the PCM closest to a heat-producing element melts long before the bulk material absorbs much energy. If the pad components were submerged in a PCM without any additional structures, some of the PCM would melt but most of its volume wouldn\u27t be utilized.This presentation discusses an innovative static heat exchanger designed to transfers thermal energy from the heat-generating elements of wireless charging pads into surrounding Phase Change Material. Transient modeling demonstrated that the heat exchanger improved the thermal performance of the charging pads by distributing heat throughout the PCM volume. This presentation includes a discussion of the components that were fabricated in USU facilities and concludes with recommendations for future design improvements.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/fsrs2020/1060/thumbnail.jp

Review on Key Factors of Wireless Power Transfer Technology for Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles (EVs) have become an alternative option for a clean energy society. A new charging technology which is wireless charging has been developed to satisfy the limitations of EVs which are the electric drive range and battery storage. Companies like Tesla, BMW, and Nissan have already started to develop wireless charging for EVs. This paper presents a literature review on wireless charging of EVs. The existing technologies for Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) system are summarized for different power applications. Coil design plays the most vital role in the WPT system so the different coil design with the transferred efficiency is reviewed. The other important parameters and technical components like significant factors of WPT system, track layout of dynamic wireless charging, foreign object detection method, and position alignment method that are affecting the efficiency of the wireless charging system are also discussed. Lastly, health and safety concerns for human beings and living things are investigated

On M2M Micropayments : A Case Study of Electric Autonomous Vehicles

The proliferation of electric vehicles has spurred the research interest in technologies associated with it, for instance, batteries, and charging mechanisms. Moreover, the recent advancements in autonomous cars also encourage the enabling technologies to integrate and provide holistic applications. To this end, one key requirement for electric vehicles is to have an efficient, secure, and scalable infrastructure and framework for charging, billing, and auditing. However, the current manual charging systems for EVs may not be applicable to the autonomous cars that demand new, automatic, secure, efficient, and scalable billing and auditing mechanism. Owing to the distributed systems such as blockchain technology, in this paper, we propose a new charging and billing mechanism for electric vehicles that charge their batteries in a charging-on-the-move fashion. To meet the requirements of billing in electric vehicles, we leverage distributed ledger technology (DLT), a distributed peer-to-peer technology for micro-transactions. Our proof-of-concept implementation of the billing framework demonstrates the feasibility of such system in electric vehicles. It is also worth noting that the solution can easily be extended to the electric autonomous cars (EACs)

Challenges and Barriers of Wireless Charging Technologies for Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles could be a significant aid in lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Even though extensive study has been done on the features and traits of electric vehicles and the nature of their charging infrastructure, network modeling for electric vehicle manufacturing has been limited and unchanging. The necessity of wireless electric vehicle charging, based on magnetic resonance coupling, drove the primary aims for this review work. Herein, we examined the basic theoretical framework for wireless power transmission systems for EV charging and performed a software-in-the-loop analysis, in addition to carrying out a performance analysis of an EV charging system based on magnetic resonance. This study also covered power pad designs and created workable remedies for the following issues: (i) how power pad positioning affected the function of wireless charging systems and (ii) how to develop strategies to keep power efficiency at its highest level. Moreover, safety features of wireless charging systems, owing to interruption from foreign objects and/or living objects, were analyzed, and solutions were proposed to ensure such systems would operate as safely and optimally as possible

Thermal Modeling and Analysis of Roadway Embedded Wireless Power Transfer Modules

Wireless charging of electric vehicles is a developing technology which potentially increases efficiency and safety. It also allows for charging vehicles while they are moving by having charging stations embedded in the roadway. Because roadways are thermally insulating, it is important to know how the heat from the charging stations will move through the roadway, which will allow further research into whether the heat will cause damage to the components in the station or to the roadway. This thesis studies the way the heat moves through concrete with wireless charging coils embedded in it. This is accomplished by measuring the relevant material properties of materials used in such a system of concrete and charging components and using those properties in a simulation. Specifically, to measure the properties of concrete, an experiment with a matching computer simulation is used. These measured properties and others are then used in a different computer simulation to explore how quickly a charging station will heat up. This simulation is compared to experiments on a real charging station for validation. A station with a material designed to absorb heat implemented is also compared to a station without such a material in an effort to understand other ways of managing the heat generation within the station

Event-triggered H∞ position control of receiver coil for effective mobile wireless charging of electric vehicles

The emergence of dynamic wireless charging technologies brings about new possibilities for on-road real-time charging of electric vehicles in solving the battery bottleneck for the mass roll-out of electric vehicles worldwide. In this new area, charging efficiency is one of the most important issues to be addressed for on-road wireless charging. While most current research mainly focuses on the electronic power design of the charging system, little has been done to improve charging efficiency through real-time mechanical control. In this paper, a switch control strategy based on an event-triggered mechanism is proposed, to improve the charging efficiency when an electric vehicle moves along a power supply road track. An H∞ control problem is formulated and sufficient stabilization criteria are derived in the form of linear matrix inequalities when the electric vehicle derails from the effective charging range. Numerical simulation confirms that the proposed control approach outperforms the general state feedback control method. The developed control strategy is applied to control a newly built electric vehicle wireless charging test platform with desirable control performance