Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Urban autonomous electric mobility (e-mobility)and electric mass transitare being realized quickly. Theyare the dire need for populous metropolitan cities.In addition, urban mass transit (buses, subways, and trams), among other modes of urban transportation, are a major challenge facing cities. In several overcrowded cities around the world, existing urban mobility systems are simply inadequate. Harmful emissions, accidents, knotty congestions, and unscheduled operations are just among the critical few issues that are creating transportation chaos worldwide. Autonomous and driverless e-mobility will certainly alleviate such disruptions. These newmodes of urban e-mobility will be smart and free of human error. The key ingredient to build a sustainable and efficient autonomous mobility infrastructure will most certainly include electrified transportation. Opportunistic static charging and dynamic, in-motion charging of urban autonomous e-mobility and masse-transport, powered either by high-energy batteries or high-power ultracapacitors, will be the need of the hour. Novel power electronic conversion systems and innovative coil designs will play a major role in interfacing high-energy/high-power electric storage systems to the charging infrastructure. The proposed NSERC DG program specifically address the above issues comprehensively, focusing on the design of universal, wide-ranging wireless fast charging infrastructures. Both static (opportunity charging) as well as in-motion (dynamic charging) systems will be designed, developed, tested, and verified. Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) can be essentially classified into two methodologies: Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) and Capacitive Power Transfer (CPT). IPT is the more established method, while CPT is an emerging approach, catering solely to low-power levels at the moment (up to 1.0 kW). The proposed NSERC DG program will aim to address several key challenges in advancing the state-of-the-art for both WPT methods. The specific focus of this proposal is high power, high-efficiency static and in-motion fast charging for future modes of urban autonomous e-mobility and mass electric transportation from e-bikes to e-buses. WPT charger ratings ranging from 1.0 kW to 50.0 kW will be investigated. The overall program is divided in to 6 major tasks: 1) IPT magnetics (coil) design; 2)Novel WPT power electronic converter designs; 3) Advanced WPT controller development; 4) Design of an in-motion (dynamic) opportunity fast charger (50 kW); 5)Capacitance design for CPT; hybrid IPT/CPT design; and 6) EMI shielding. The above exclusive researchtargets make the proposed programparticularly unique and specialized. This research will most definitely lead to future progress, more specifically, with regards to overall efficiency and performance improvement of autonomous e-mobility/e-transportation infrastructure.