Date of Award

5-2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Legacy Department

Electrical Engineering

Committee Member

Dr. Anthony Q. Martin, Committee Chair

Committee Member

Dr. Pingshan Wang

Committee Member

Dr. Harlan B. Russell

Abstract

The research work for this thesis is based on utilizing resonant magnetic induction for wirelessly charging electric vehicles. The background theory for electromagnetic induction between two conducting loops is given and it is shown that an equivalent circuit can be used to model the loops. An analysis of the equivalent circuit is used to show how two loosely coupled loops can be made to exchange energy efficiently by operating them at a frequency which is the same as the resonant frequency of both. Furthermore, it is shown that the efficiency is the maximum for critical coupling (determined by the quality factors of the loops), and increasing the coupling beyond critical coupling causes double humps to appear in the transmission efficiency versus frequency spectrum. In the experiment, as the loops are brought closer together which increases the coupling between them, doubles humps, as expected from the equivalent circuit analysis is seen. Two models for wireless energy transfer are identified: basic model and array model. The basic model consists of the two loosely coupled loops, the transmitter and the receiver. The array model consists of a 2 x 2 array of the transmitter and three parasites, and the receiver. It is shown that the array model allows more freedom for receiver placement at the cost of degraded transmission efficiency compared to the basic model. Another important part of the thesis is software validation. HFSS-IE and 4NEC2 are the software tools used and the simulation results for wire antennas are compared against references obtained from a textbook and a PhD dissertation. It is shown that the simulations agree well with the references and also with each other.

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