A compact resonace-based wireless energy transfer system for implanted electronic devices

PurposeThis paper aims to develop mathematical models of variously compensated wireless energy transfer (WET) systems. Attention is primarily paid to the derivation of the most important energy transfer characteristics such as efficiency and amount of transferred power. This paper discusses the main advantages and disadvantages of various compensation techniques to show their possible application areas. On the basis of these results, a designer will be able to quickly identify which compensation type suites as the best solution to fulfill a given system’s requirements.Design/methodology/approachFirst, the current state in the field of mathematical modeling of WET systems is introduced. Next, the non-resonant magnetic-coupled circuit together with four most common resonant magnetic-coupled circuits is analyzed. The equivalent circuit models using loop currents methodology is applied to the analyses. The proposed methodology is experimentally verified by the laboratory measurement of selected circuit topology. The main contribution of the proposed methodology lies in its quick applicability on more complicated or extended systems while keeping a relatively good match with the real system’s behavior.FindingsThe authors have presented the usage of a simple and accurate methodology for investigating variously compensated WET systems. Electrical engineers who require effective and powerful tools for the identification of basic WET systems properties will find this methodology to be of extensive help.Research limitations/implicationsThe analyses consider only the sinusoidal type of supply voltage; so, it is valid mainly for the close range of the resonant state. Nonlinearities cannot be taken into account.Practical implicationsThis research may be applied in the field of WET systems.Originality/valueResearch in the area of power electronic systems, which provides a clear and straightforward procedure for WET system identification, will be helpful to most practical technicians who are not well versed in areas of physical-based phenomena.

The effect of various parameters on the resonance-based wireless energy transfer system has been investigated to obtain the design steps for efficient wireless energy transfer. Both theoretically and experimentally, it has been observed that every system has its own strongly coupled region that is an optimum frequency band for which maximum energy transfer occurs. The frequency band of the strongly coupled region changes with the coil size, structure, physical spacing, relative location, and material properties of the wire. Based on the theoretical results, experiments have been carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness and characteristics of the resonant wireless energy transfer method. It is found that the energy transfer efficiency reaches maximum at resonant frequency. The energy transfer efficiency is further enhanced by changing the configuration of coil and through low-resistance wire with high-quality factor. The analyses will give future guidelines for designing a compact efficient wireless energy transfer system to energize macro as well as micro devices used for various applications.

The current trend puts emphasis on the efficiency of the all electronics devices. For this reason, it is necessary to maximize the efficiency of the wireless energy transfer system as well as on other electronic devices. Therefore, this article deals with the most suitable working point analysis of the serial–serial WET system. The core of the article contains the simulation analysis at the various loads and various coupling coefficients. Experimental measurements were made on the existing prototype and the results were compared with the results from the simulation analysis. The main outcome of this paper is thus detailed investigation of operational point of WET system in order to meet the highest possible system efficiency together with the highest possible level of transferred power.

Wireless charging systems are critical for safely and efficiently recharging mobile electronic devices. Current wireless charging technologies involving inductive coupling, magnetic resonance coupling, and microwave transmission are bulky, require complicated systems, expose users to harmful radiation, and have very short energy transmission distances. Herein, we report on a long-distance optical power transmission system by optimizing the external cavity structure of semiconductor lasers for laser charging applications. An ultra-long stable oscillating laser cavity with a transmission distance of 10 m is designed. The optimal laser cavity design is determined by simulating the structural parameters for stable operation, and an improved laser cavity that produces an output of 2.589 W at a transmission distance of 150 cm is fabricated. The peak power attenuation when the transmission distance increases from 50 to 150 cm is only approximately 6.4%, which proves that this wireless power transfer scheme based on a vertical external cavity surface-emitting laser can be used to realize ultra-long-distance power transmission. The proposed wireless energy transmission scheme based on a VECSEL laser is the first of its kind to report a 1.5 m transmission distance output power that exceeds 2.5 W. Compared with other wireless energy transmission technologies, this simple, compact, and safe long-distance wireless laser energy transmission system is more suitable for indoor charging applications.

Since the concept of wireless power transfer has been proposed and implemented by Tesla over a hundred years ago, it has obtained lots of breakthroughs and applied in many potential fields especially in implantable biomedical devices [1–2]. The implantable biomedical devices are surgically introduces into the human body to rebuild body function, achieve a better quality of life, and expand longevity. With the development of microelectronics, biotechnology, and materials, the industry of implantable biomedical devices grows up quickly. The researches show that in America 8% to 10% of the people have experienced an implantable medical device, while in industrialized countries 5% to 6% of population have consumption demand in implantable medical devices. How to provide a constant power supply, for implantable medical devices, becomes a restricted problem. In order to guarantee the implanted medical devices to work normally, the energy storage or harvesting components should be included in these devices. In the traditional implantable medical devices, there are two ways to provide power for the devices. The common method is the implantable batteries are used to be as a power supply, and the other method is to transfer the power in vitro to the devices with the lead wires through the skin. For implantable batteries, their lifetime, size and toxic composition will lead to potential hazard to the patients. The transcutaneous wires, as well, will bring infection and reliability problems. In order to address above problems, the technology of wireless power transfer is used in the biomedical devices. The system has two parts in which one part including power supply and the transmitter coil is placed outside the patients’ body, and the other part including the receiver coil is placed in the patients’ body. For this system, the receiver coil should be limited as small as possible and the power transfer efficiency should be as high as possible. Different from the traditional two-coil wireless power transfer system, a novel three-coil system is proposed in this paper. In the novel system, there are two rectangular transmitter coils and one circular receiver coil. To obtain the maximum power transfer efficiency, the system is optimal designed according to the following step as shown in Fig. 1. Firstly, the size and the geometry of the receiver coil are determined. A circular coil with a radius of 10mm is chosen as the receiver coil. Secondly, the distribution of the magnetic field generated by the rectangular coil is analyzed based on the Biot-Savart’s law. Then the relationship between the distance and the magnetic field intensity will be obtained and expressed as a formula according to the analysis result. Finally, the above formula is chosen as the optimization constrains and the power transfer efficiency is chosen as the optimization objective function. After the optimal designing, the optimal parameters of the transmitter coils are obtained and verified through the experimental system as shown in Fig. 2. The power transfer distance is about 30cm, and the power received by the receiver coil can achieve about 5W. The detailed results will be given in the full paper.

Wireless energy transfer (WET) is potentially a promising solution to provide convenient and reliable energy supplies for energy-constrained networks, and has drawn growing interests recently. To overcome the significant propagation loss over distance, employing multi-antennas at the energy transmitter (ET) to more efficiently direct wireless energy to desired energy receivers (ERs), termed energy beamforming, is an essential technique for WET. However, the achievable gain of energy beamforming crucially depends on the available channel state information (CSI) at the ET, which needs to be acquired practically. In this paper, we study the optimal design of one efficient channel-acquisition method for a point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) WET system, by exploiting the channel reciprocity based on which the ET estimates the CSI via dedicated reverse-link training from the ER. Considering the limited energy availability at the ER, the training strategy should be carefully designed so that the channel can be estimated with sufficient accuracy, and yet without consuming excessive energy at the ER. To this end, we propose to maximize the net energy at the ER, which is the total energy harvested offset by that used for channel training. The optimal training design, including the number of receive antennas to be trained, as well as the training time and power allocated, is derived. Our result shows that training helps only when the following conditions are satisfied: (i) the channel coherence time is sufficiently large; (ii) the number of antennas at the ET is large enough; and (iii) the effective signal-to-noise ratio (ESNR) is sufficiently high; otherwise, no training should be applied and isotropic energy transmission is optimal.

This letter considers spectrum sharing between a multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless energy transfer (WET) system and a coexisting point-to-point MIMO wireless information transmission (WIT) system, where WET generates interference to WIT and degrades its throughput performance. We show that due to the interference, the WIT system suffers from a loss of the degrees of freedom (DoF) proportional to the number of energy beams sent by the energy transmitter (ET), which, in general, needs to be larger than one to optimize the multiuser WET with user fairness consideration. To minimize the DoF loss in WIT, we further propose a new single-beam energy transmission scheme based on the principle of time sharing, where the ET transmits one of the optimal energy beams at each time. This new scheme achieves the same optimal performance for the WET system, and minimizes the impact of its interference to the WIT system.

This paper presents a miniature wireless energy transfer system design for implantable pressure sensor used for health monitoring applications. The implantable pressure sensor can be wirelessly powered through strongly coupled magnetic resonance based wireless energy transfer system. The wireless power transfer system has been built up by using a power transmitting circuit which will be placed outside the body and a receiving unit connected to the implantable pressure sensor to be kept inside the body. Experimentally, it has been found that the wireless power transfer from the transmitting coil to the implantable receiving coil depends on the operating frequency, separation distance between the coils and configuration of the coils. It has been found that maximum wireless power transfer occurs from the transmitting unit to the implantable receiving unit at the operating resonant frequency of the system. At the resonant frequency of 562 kHz and optimum load of 40 Ω, a maximum power of 0.186 W and energy transfer efficiency of 26% have been achieved wirelessly with a separation distance of 3 cm between the transmitter and receiver resonators. Electromagnetic simulation has also been carried out using the different forms of transmitting and receiving coils in order to obtain a strong magnetic coupled wireless energy transfer system, which plays an important role in the energy transfer efficiency.

This chapter provides an overview of the main energy harvesting (EH) technologies and their relevant role in present and future internet of things (IoT) deployments. EH technologies for wireless machine-type devices can be mainly classified into the following two categories: ambient EH, and dedicated EH. The chapter emphasizes on RF–EH, and highlights its advantages compared to competing EH technologies reduced form-factor implementation and native multi-user support. RF–wireless energy transfer (WET) systems consist of three key components: RF transmitters, medium, and EH node. It focuses on the non-decreasing EH transfer function with the incident RF waveform power as sole input. The chapter describes the general architecture of an RF–EH IoT network, and the main layouts for wireless information transfer (WIT) and WET along with potential applications. WET, as a pivotal component of RF–EH networks, is fundamental for realizing the Internet of Energy paradigm.

A general equivalent circuit model is developed for a wireless energy transfer system composed of multiple coils via coupled magnetic resonances. To verify the developed model, four types of wireless energy transfer systems are fabricated, measured, and compared with simulation results. To model a system composed of n-coils, node equations are built in the form of an n-by-n matrix, and the equivalent circuit model is established using an electric design automation tool. Using the model, we can simulate systems with multiple coils, power sources, and loads. Moreover, coupling constants are extracted as a function of the distance between two coils, and we can predict the characteristics of a system having coils at an arbitrary location. We fabricate four types of systems with relay coils, two operating frequencies, two power sources, and the function of characteristic impedance conversion. We measure the characteristics of all systems and compare them with the simulation results. The flexibility of the developed model enables us to design and optimize a complicated system consisting of many coils.

Energy beamforming (EB) is a key technique for achieving efficient radio-frequency (RF) transmission enabled wireless energy transfer (WET). By optimally designing the waveforms from multiple energy transmitters (ETs) over the wireless channels, they are constructively combined at the energy receiver (ER) to achieve an EB gain that scales with the number of ETs. However, the optimal design of transmit waveforms requires accurate channel state information (CSI) at the ETs, which is challenging to obtain in practical WET systems. In this paper, we propose a new channel training scheme to achieve optimal EB gain in a distributed WET system, where multiple separated ETs adjust their transmit phases to collaboratively send power to a single ER in an iterative manner, based on one-bit feedback from the ER per training interval which indicates the increase/decrease of the received power level from one particular ET over two preassigned transmit phases. The proposed EB algorithm can be efficiently implemented in practical WET systems even with a large number of distributed ETs, and is analytically shown to converge quickly to the optimal EB design as the number of feedback intervals per ET increases. Numerical results are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm as compared to other distributed EB designs.

This chapter examines simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) scenarios. It discusses the main SWIPT receivers, namely, separate and co-located receivers. The chapter provides numerical examples on the performance of the designed SWIPT precoding strategy. It focuses on a co-located SWIPT system, where a HAP serves a set S of devices performing both energy harvesting and information decoding in a given frequency band. The chapter illustrates some numerical results on the performance of the time switching and power splitting protocols. It also discusses some specific promising approaches to boost the performance of SWIPT systems for general wireless energy transfer (WET)-powered internet of things networks. WET and SWIPT systems are subject to non-linear responses that are often model-intractable unless too strong assumptions are adopted. The chapter concludes with an overview of some potential techniques to enable efficient SWIPT in future networks.

In rotary ultrasonic machining, contactless energy transfer (CET) is developed to transmit energy to the transducer at the series resonant frequency or resonant frequency of the transducer. Specifically, during energy transmission, variations in working conditions such as variable axial forces will change the load of the transducer and introduce undesired dynamic effects into the contactless energy transfer system (CETS). In order to explore the connections between these variations and the working performance more directly and theoretically, a new theoretical model—CETS impedance circle is proposed in this paper to reflect the CETS dynamic characteristics, including the CETS frequency characteristics and the relationships between CETS transfer performances at different frequencies under load variations. With the developed theoretical model, the effect of load variations on the trends of CETS impedance circle is investigated. Moreover, based on the impedance circle and its trends, the CETS frequency characteristics, the effect of primary series compensation, and a comparison of the transfer performances at the two working frequencies are theoretically studied. Finally, the CETS impedance circle theories are experimentally verified, and the experimental results are consistent with the analysis of the theoretical model.

With the development of electronic science and technology, people have entered the information society, a variety of portable electronic products enter people’s lives. A large number of miniature human implantable medical devices applied to clinical fields. The traditional human implantable medical device power supply is implanted battery, its biggest drawback is the treatment problem after the battery power consumption. Whether it is taken to replace the new battery, or deep into the body, there is a huge risk. Therefore, the portable external wireless charging, it becomes the best choice for human implantable medical devices. Because some of the implanted device volume is very small, they can't accommodate bulky solenoid coil, which seriously restrict the application of wireless charging technology in implantable medical devices. Printed circuit board (PCB) coil has the advantages of high wiring density, small volume, light weight, beneficial to the miniaturization of electronic equipment, they can replace traditional solenoid coil, and applied to the wireless charging technology. In this paper, HFSS software is used to simulate, a large number of simulation experiments are carried out on the PCB with 2 layers coils. At the same time, the electrical parameters such as layer spacing, line width and resonant frequency are analyzed. Finally, the conclusion is: in the case of fixed layer spacing, with the increasing of the line width, the resonance frequency is gradually reduced; but the resonance frequency is reduced to a certain extent, it is not changed. When line width is fixed, with the growing layer spacing, the resonance frequency value is constantly increasing, the resonant frequency of the growth is also more and more slow.

The paper presents a capacitive wireless power transfer system. System description, simulation model and laboratory test bench have been presented. Preliminary simulation and laboratory results have been presented. The directions of further work were defined. The work was carried out under the HEET II (High Efficiency Energy Transfer) project, financed by the Research Fund for Coal and Steel (RFCS).