A Contactless Power Supply for a DC Power Service

It is expected that, in the future, DC power service will be widely used for photovoltaic home power generation systems, since DC consuming devices are ever increasing. Instead of using multiple converters to convert DC to AC and then AC to DC, the power service could solely be based on DC. This would eliminate the need for converters, reducing the cost, complexity, and possibly increasing the efficiency. However, configuration of direct DC power service with mechanical contacts can cause spark voltage or an electric shock when the switch is turned on and off. To solve these problems, in this paper, a contactless power supply for a DC power service that can transfer electric power produced by photovoltaics to the home electric system using magnetic coupling instead of mechanical contacts has been proposed. The proposed system consists of a ZVS boost converter, a half-bridge LLC resonant converter, and a contactless transformer. This proposed contactless system eliminates the use of DC switches. To reduce the stress and loss of the boost converter switching devices, a lossless snubber with coupled inductor is applied. In this paper, a switching frequency control technique using the contactless voltage sensing circuit is also proposed and implemented for the output voltage control instead of using additional power regulators. Finally, a prototype consisted of 150W boost converter has been designed and built to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed contactless photovoltaic DC power service. Experimental results show that 74~83% overall system efficiency is obtained for the 10W~80W load.