A New Concept: Asymmetrical Pick-Ups for Inductively Coupled Power Transfer Monorail Systems

Inductively coupled power transfer systems have recently proven to be popular in moving vehicle monorail systems situated in difficult environments such as clean rooms. In such applications the magnetic design is critical if low weight high power pick-ups are to be realized. Early designs were largely experimental and used magnetic shapes that easily fit the existing structure. Modern finite-element-modeling packages are now being used to achieve significant alterations to the pick-up shape under the assumption that the monorail structures can be changed. This paper introduces several important magnetic design metrics that must be considered in such a design process, and applies these to various newly proposed and unconventional asymmetrical pick-up shapes. These new pick-ups are shown to be capable of achieving comparable power output with lower ferrite volume/length of the pick-up structure, or significant increases in output power for identical volume/length, to a conventional E-shaped pick-up