Design and construction of a reliable wireless power transfer system for an embedded device : With emphasis on industrial applications

Sammanfattning: This thesis deals with wireless power transfer from an external source to embedded small devices (such as for conditioning monitoring, control etc.) located at different distances from the source. The proposed designs can be used in a variety of applications, including mobile phones, electric cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, robots, etc. where it could be very convenient to transmit power without wires/cables. The wireless charging method which avoids using conventional cables and wires for energizing or charging electrical devices has been one of the fastest developed recent technologies. The inductive coupling technique is one way to transfer power wirelessly and works fairly well over very short distances. For distances greater than the radius of the emitter, however, inductive coupling rapidly declines. An improved approach is to create inductive-capacitive resonance which improves efficiency and transfer distance, which was proposed by Tesla. Other methods using more than two coils have lately been proposed, which improve transfer characteristics even further. Several designs were proposed consisting of two, three and four coil combinations, with different shapes and sizes. A ferrite cored solenoid was also chosen as emitter in some setups over air cored solenoid, for better field enhancement in longitudinal energy transfer applications. To have low resistive high energy transfer, coil-capacitor designs were proposed. Several simulations were performed using COMSOL Multiphysics software to understand the magnetic field distribution and transfer to the adjacent coils in air medium. Based on this power transfer efficiency graphs were plotted for every proposed design. For validation, few simulations were contrasted with lab experiments. The focus was to develop and contribute to the improvement of existing techniques. For this, it is sometimes enough to transfer a small amount of power (e.g., 0.5 W) at different distances and frequencies with different set ups. The results obtained from the simulation and measurements were used to evaluate the impact of frequency and transfer distance on energy transfer in wireless power transfer techinque for proposed design. The analysis was used to suggest the improvements or part of future work in the designs such as use of Litz wire and ferrite concentrators with thin conductive laminates.