Thermal Analysis of Coupled Resonant Coils for an Electric Vehicle Wireless Charging System

Abstract

Electric vehicles use wireless energy transmission to obtain energy, which can effectively avoid the shortcomings of traditional methods. As the carrier of radio energy transmission and reception, the high temperature of the coil triggers the degradation of wireless transmission performance and the aging of the coil, which may cause fire and other safety problems in serious cases. This paper studied the temperature distribution of the magnetically coupled coil model for electric vehicles. Based on the study of the basic law of heat transfer, the coil model was established using ANSYS software, and the boundary conditions and relevant parameters were set. After many simulation experiments and comparisons, it was finally determined that the transmitting coil and the receiving coil were the same sizes, the inner diameter of the coil was 100 mm, the outer diameter of the coil was 181 mm, and the coupling distance between the transmitting coil and the receiving coil was set to 60 mm. Coil models were simulated and analyzed using different materials. The simulation results show that after 30 min of system operation, the material chosen from the temperature range may have been gold, silver, copper, or aluminum, but from the comprehensive consideration of cost and performance, the material of the coil in the model was finally set to copper. Copper was the best material; its temperature maximum was 74.952 °C and lower than the safety value of 80 °C. It is hoped that this study will provide a reference for wireless charging coil design.