Frequency Tracking Method and Compensation Parameters Optimization to Improve Capacitor Deviation Tolerance of the Wireless Power Transfer System

Compensation capacitors are naturally susceptible to manufacturing defects and aging effects, leading to the degraded performance of a wireless power transfer (WPT) system. This article focuses on the compensation parameters optimization during the design stage and control strategy during the operation phase to improve the inherent capacitor error tolerance of the WPT system. The Sobol sensitivity method is applied to rank the importance of deviations of three capacitors on the transfer characteristics, and then the method of tracking the secondary resonance frequency is proposed. The numerical method is applied to find the optimal compensation parameters, with the constraint that the output voltage change caused by the shift of the designed compensation condition is limited to be less than ±5%. Experimental results show that with the proposed frequency tracking method and compensation parameter optimization, the deviation tolerance index is decreased from 0.485 to 0.363, showing an improvement of 25.2%, and the minimum power factor is increased from 0.78 to 0.89. Besides, the characteristics of constant primary coil current and voltage gain are almost not affected.