Collaboration develops wireless charging system for race cars

Drayson Racing, which develops and races ’green’ motorsport technology, plans to market HaloIPT’s technology to the motorsport industry as a replacement for the internal combustion engine and pit stops for fuel.

The system is based on Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) wireless charging, which uses strongly coupled magnetic resonance to transfer power from a transmitting pad hidden in the road or race track to a receiving pad on an electric car.

The pad in the ground is supplied with electrical power at a current typically in the range of 5–125A. The pad is inductive so compensation using series or parallel capacitors is used to reduce the working voltages and currents in the supply circuitry.

Within the car, pick-up coils are magnetically coupled to a primary coil. Power is transferred by tuning the pick-up coil to the operating frequency of the primary coil with a series or parallel capacitor.