• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.468-479
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• 2016

In order to supply power to online monitoring systems that are attached to high voltage catenary or overhead wires, a wireless power transfer system is required that is able to transmit power over the insulation gap. Such wireless power transfer systems have transmitter and receiver coils that have diameters of over 10cm. This paper focused on an investigation of the sources of loss in the coils when the coils are fabricated using printed circuit board technology. Using finite element simulation results, it has been shown that the dielectric loss in the substrate was the dominant source of the total loss. It has been demonstrated that the selection of a proper dielectric material was the most critical factor in reducing the loss. For further reduction of the loss, the distributed tuning capacitor method and the slotting of the inter-turn spaces have been proposed. For the evaluation of the proposed methods, four coils have been fabricated and their equivalent series resistances and quality factors were measured. Measured quality factors were greater than 300, which means that these devices will be helpful in achieving high coil-to-coil efficiency.