A novel reliable and compact inverter for wireless power transfer

In this paper a highly reliable and compact inverter is proposed. This inverter is capable of both stepping up and stepping down the voltage and can be used for inductive wireless power transfer. The proposed inverter is an extension of the dc-dc Ćuk converter; therefore, a capacitor that forms the link is responsible for transferring the power from the input towards the output. The converter is designed and controlled such that the required link capacitance is very low; therefore, film capacitors can be used instead of electrolytic capacitors that are unreliable. The proposed inverter can offer soft-switching by adding a small inductor to the link. In this paper, the principles of the operation of the proposed inverter will be studied, and its performance will be evaluated. The application that is considered in this paper is wireless charging.