Grant: Alliance Grants

Urban autonomous transport is coming in a major way and is the dire need for populous metropolitan cities. Driverless cars will be electric in nature (autonomous urban e-mobility). In addition, urban mass transit (buses, subways, and trams) as well as the aforementioned trending autonomous mobility (e-autonomy; driverless e-cars), among various other modes of urban transportation, are a major challenge facing populous metropolitan cities. The key ingredient to build a sustainable and efficient autonomous mobility infrastructure will most certainly include electrified transportation. Almost all future mobility and smart autonomous transportation will be electric in nature, powered by high-energy batteries or high-power ultracapacitors. New power electronic conversion systems will play a major role in managing on-board power/energy and interfacing these high-energy/high-power electric storage systems to the charging infrastructure.The proposed project specifically address the above issues comprehensively, focusing on the design of universal, wide-ranging rapid wireless charging infrastructures. The proposed infrastructure will investigate Level-1 and Level-2 charging levels as per the SAE J2954 wireless power transfer (WPT) standards (Level-1, 3.7 kW and Level-2, 7.7 kW). The WPT charger will include vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charge/discharge by incorporating bidirectional power flow in the power conversion stages of the design - this will include the design of bidirectional, 1-phase matrix converters. The project will aim to address several key challenges in advancing the state-of-the-art for WPT-based charging. The specific challenges to be addressed by this project include high-power, high-efficiency, bidirectional, universal charger design, whereby battery voltage levels from 150 V to 1000 V can be catered to.