WIRELESS POWER TRANSFER FOR INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS THROUGH STRONGLY COUPLED MAGNETIC RESONANCES

Jan Pannier1, Dries Hendrickx1, Frederik Petr2, Tiene Nobels3

1

Master student Electromechanical Engineering, GROUP T Leuven Engineering College, Vesaliusstraat 13, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium 2 Flanders Mechatronics Technology Centre (FMTC), Celestijnenlaan 300D, B-3001 Heverlee, Belgium, Frederik.Petre@fmtc.be 3 Unit Energy, GROUP T Leuven Engineering College, Vesaliusstraat 13, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium Tiene.Nobels@groupt.be

Abstract: Because of the numerous advantages related to the use of wireless sensors, the feasibility of extending an existing wireless power setup, initially designed for static power transfer, to a wireless power setup with a rotary receiver has been investigated. The main difference between both setups is the emergence of intermittent behavior due to movement of the receiver. Besides that, existing parts such as the tank and rectifier circuits, were optimized in order to increase efficiency and improve integrability. Most of the conducted experiments were therefore efficiency measurements for a variety of realistic situations. Also, an analysis of the major losses was performed. Throughout all static experiments the new coil design proves to be better than the original one when it comes down to transfer efficiency. Furthermore, the new design is far more suited for integration on a PCB. Finally, the operation of the wireless power system was successfully demonstrated for a rotating shaft application with speeds up to 120 rpm. Keywords: Magnetic Resonance, RF Coil Design, RF Rectification, Wireless Power INTRODUCTION Wireless sensors offer tremendous advantages in the manufacturing value chain, with value-added industrial applications as diverse as wireless condition monitoring, wireless control and wireless safety. Next to wireless data communication, realizing an efficient wireless power solution is one of the main technical challenges to realize self-powered wireless sensors that do not require battery maintenance. Recently, inductive wireless power technology has gained significant momentum for consumer applications as evidenced by the rising number of high-tech startup companies in this area (WiTricity, Fulton Innovation, Wisepower, etc.) and the interest shown by consumer giants such as Intel and Sony [1,2,3,4,5]. In this perspective, the Wireless Power Consortium is setting the international standard for interoperable wireless battery charging of all kinds of mobile devices such as digital cameras and smart phones [6]. Already back in 2007, FMTC demonstrated the technical feasibility of inductive wireless power transfer based on strongly coupled magnetic resonant circuits at 27 MHz [7]. This setup was designed for a specific industrial application involving a translation movement of the receiver coil and, although very different from our new application, served as a starting point for our project. This setup will be referred to as the original setup throughout this text. This work focuses on the specific industrial application case of wireless power transfer to a wireless sensor node attached to a rotating shaft. This case, which is representative to many rotating machinery applications, is not only very suitable to demonstrate the use of wireless power transfer but also introduces an extra difficulty, namely intermittent behavior. Tackling these problems together with the improvement of the overall efficiency and the integrability of the wireless power receiver were the main goals of this project. To save time and effort, the other components of the previous wireless power transmitter, such as the oscillator and power amplifier, were maximally reused because the primary focus is on the wireless power receiver (mounted on the rotating shaft). Since the original setup already uses magnetic resonance, increasing the overall power efficiency comes down to optimization and re-design of the tank circuits and the bridge rectifier in particular. Because of their major role in optimizing efficiency and improving integrability, the biggest challenge resides in the design of the coils. This work provides the reader with information about the architecture, the design and the evaluation of the new wireless power system. Finally, our conclusions are summarized and some potential improvements for future research are proposed. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE Decomposition of the wireless power setup at top level yields four major subsystems as shown in Figure 1. The red arrows represent the interfaces between the subsystems. The industrial application provides the necessary context to demonstrate the correct operation of the wireless power setup. The main component of the industrial application context is the rotating shaft. The other subsystems require a more extensive step by step decomposition.

Figure 1: Top Level Architecture. Figure 2 shows a more detailed decomposition of the

wireless power transmitter. A mechanical stand, mounted on the table, allows the transmitter (or primary) tank circuit to be placed at the correct height. The transmitter tank circuit is fed by a power amplifier which amplifies the signal from the signal generator.

Figure 5: Architecture of Performance Registration. Figure 2: Architecture of Wireless Power Transmitter. The wireless power receiver is decomposed as shown in Figure 3. The mechanical clamp acts as a solid support for all rotating parts. The receiver (or secondary) tank circuit captures the power signal (magnetic flux) from the air. Next, the power signal is conditioned and finally delivered to the load (purely resistive). DESIGN OF TANK AND CONDITIONING CIRCUITS A. Tank Circuits One of the main goals is to research how to optimize the tank circuits for maximum transfer efficiency while keeping them as small as possible. Eventually integration on a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) should be possible. Since the capacitors are commercial off the shelf (COTS) components, the main difficulty for this part of the setup lies within the coil design. The original setup used small rectangular coils. This coil concept was optimized for one specific application, so next to this one, experiments with three new coil concepts were conducted. All concepts are shown in Figure 6, and will from now on be referred to as rectangular, solenoid, planar circular and planar square. The red transparent surface shows at which side the transmitter coil will couple with the receiver coil.

Figure 3: Architecture of Wireless Power Receiver. An even further analysis of the conditioning circuitry results in the structure shown in Figure 4. The rectifier, consisting of a rectifier bridge and a smoothing capacitor, serves as an AC to DC converter and also smoothes the ripple on the voltage. Next, an energy buffer is inserted to deal with the intermittent behavior. Based on the buffer voltage the On/Off circuit decides whether the switching regulators should be active or not. In this way the correct amount of voltage is always guaranteed.

Figure 6: Rectangular (a), Solenoid (b), Planar Circular (c) and Planar Square (d) Coil Concepts.

Figure 4: Architecture of Conditioning Circuitry. Figure 5 represents the decomposition of the performance registration, the last top level subsystem. The voltage measurements are performed using voltage dividers to make sure none of the analog inputs of the data logger are damaged. Next, the data logger transmits a wireless data signal which is then captured by the base station. The base station is connected to the PC through USB. Once the data is available on the PC, Labview is used to alter it to its desired form.

Figure 7: Rectangular (a), Solenoid (b), Planar Circular (c) and Planar Square (d) Coil Prototypes. Discrete coils with insulated copper wire (shown in Figure 7) were made based on calculations. The inductance of each coil is approximated using expressions for DC inductance based on the Harold A. Wheeler approximations [8]. No calculations and measurements for the rectangular concept are made, because this concept is only used as a baseline for comparison. The theoretical inductance of the solenoid is calculated as shown in Equation (1).

capacitance of 2.71 pF and 2.51 pF respectively. (1) Here L is the inductance, r the coil radius, N the number of turns, and l the length of the coil. All dimensions are in inches. The prototype has a radius of 0.0125 m (0.49 inch), a length of 0.011 m (0.43 inch) and 6 windings resulting in an inductance of 0.995 H. For the calculation of the planar coils inductance, Equation (2) is used. (2) B. Rectifier Rectification at 27 MHz introduces specific technical challenges that are not encountered at lower frequencies. For this application, the most obvious choice is a full-bridge rectifier, because a single diode rectifier would cause more efficiency loss and an active rectifier would be very hard to implement at this frequency. The voltage drop across the diodes as well as the diodes reverse recovery time, both related to their physical device nature, turn out to be the biggest loss factors. The nonlinearity introduced by the bridge rectifier does not have a significant influence on the systems power efficiency, due to the filtering behavior of the tank circuits which act as band pass filters. The voltage drop across a diode is a function of the current running through it. Also, when a diode switches from conducting to non-conducting state or vice versa the current will still flow in the wrong direction through the diode for some time. This is called the reverse recovery time [10]. The theoretical efficiency of the bridge rectifier is then calculated according to Equation (5). (5) Where is the rectification efficiency, Vin is the input voltage, Vdiode is the voltage drop across a single diode, T is the period of the rectified signal and trr is the reverse recovery time. Although the bridge rectifier produces an output of fixed polarity, a smoothing capacitor is added to smooth the amplitude of the continuously varying output. Based on Equation (5) a few suitable types were chosen. Next, the one with the highest efficiency was determined experimentally. C. Energy Buffer The energy buffer in the system has to deliver energy to the load when the transmitter and receiver are too far apart for efficient power transfer. An electric double-layer capacitor, also known as a supercap, is chosen. The main advantages of such a supercap over an electrochemical battery are: longer lifetime, very high rates of charge and discharge, extremely low internal resistance and high power density. The only significant disadvantages over normal batteries for this application are higher self-discharge, lower specific energy and a less stable output voltage [11]. D. Voltage Regulation Circuitry The voltage regulation circuitry needs to ensure that a stable 3.3 V and 5 V is delivered to the loads. Clock controlled switching regulators are used. These only work properly if the input voltage is sufficiently high. Therefore, a system is needed that only enables the conditioning ICs when the input voltage (this is the voltage across the energy buffer)

Here r is the inner radius, N is the number of turns and w is the wire diameter. All dimensions are in inches. Since no formula is available for a planar square coil, the equation for a planar circular coil is used for both concepts. The prototypes have an inner radius of 0.0085 m (0.33 inch), a wire diameter of 0.0017 m (0.066 inch) and 6 windings, resulting in an inductance of 1.181 H. The inductance is also determined experimentally. When a known capacitor (47 nF) is added in parallel with the coil, the resonant frequency needs to be measured. Subsequently, the inductance value is derived with Equation (3).

(3)

The circuit containing the solenoid resonates at 746 kHz. This results in an inductance of 0.969 H, proving the accuracy of the proposed formula. The circuits containing the planar circular and planar square coil resonate at 678 kHz and 654 kHz respectively. This results in an inductance value of 1.173 H for the planar circular coil and 1.261 H for the planar square coil. The equation proves to be accurate for the planar circular coil. As expected, the planar square coil has a higher inductance value than calculated, due to its somewhat larger cross section. Because of the high operating frequency, the parasitic capacitance cannot be neglected [9]. The parasitic capacitance is hard to calculate and is therefore determined experimentally. Since the inductance value is known, the parasitic capacitance can be calculated with Equation (4) if the resonant frequency is known.

(4) When the solenoid is excited without any added capacitance, it resonates at 94.15 MHz., this results in a parasitic capacitance of 2.95 pF. Under the same conditions, the planar circular coil resonates at 99.72 MHz and the planar square coil resonates at 89.44 MHz, resulting in a parasitic

reaches a certain high level and disables them whenever the input voltage drops beneath a certain low level. The thresholds are set to 6.5 V and 12 V for the low level and high level respectively. The On/Off circuit designed for the original setup was reused, only the high voltage level was adjusted. The schematic for the voltage conditioning circuit is shown in Figure 8.

Figure 11: Efficiency as a Function of Distance between Transmitter and Receiver Surface. From the results shown in Figure 11 two conclusions can be drawn. First, each coil concept has an optimal distance due to critical coupling. For the rectangular coils and the solenoids the optimal distance is situated below 5 mm. The optimal distance for the planar coils is situated around 20 mm, below this distance efficiency decreases due to overcoupling. Second, once beyond the point of critical coupling efficiency decreases with increasing distance. The second test examines the influence of angular displacement between the transmitter and receiver surface as shown in Figure 12.

Figure 8: Voltage Regulation Circuit Diagram. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION First, the results of the static efficiency tests for the different coil concepts are discussed. Influence of distance, angular displacement, surroundings and transferred power is tested. The setups for these tests are represented using the coupling surfaces defined in Figure 6. Second, an efficiency test on various bridge rectifiers is performed. Finally, the effect of intermittent behavior is examined. Figure 9 shows the static test setup where influence of distance is measured. To carry out other types of experiments the static test setup is each time adapted in a proper way.

Figure 12: Setup for Angular Displacement Test.

Figure 13: Efficiency as a Function of Angular Displacement of the Receiver Surface. The results shown in Figure 13 lead to two conclusions. First, the efficiency decreases more or less linearly with increasing angular displacement. Second, the planar coil concepts are clearly less affected by angular displacement. The third test is used to compare the various diode types based on their efficiency for different levels of input power.

Figure 9: Static Test Setup. The first test examines the influence of the distance between the transmitter and receiver surface as shown in Figure 10.

Figure 10: Setup for Distance Test.

buffers voltage and the power dissipated by the loads.

Figure 14: Power Efficiency of Various Diode Types at 27 MHz. Figure 14 shows that the BAT43 diode performs best at power levels below 200 mW. For power levels above 200 mW, the 1N5282 diode performs best. Figure 15 shows the test setup used for the fourth and fifth test. In the fourth test, the dynamic test setup is used with the shaft in standstill. Figure 16 shows the conditioned voltages, the energy buffers voltage and the power dissipated by the loads.

Figure 17: Results for End-To-End Dynamic Measurements. The maximum constant conditioned power the setup is able to deliver to the loads during rotation of the shaft is 60 mW when 2000 mW of input power 1 is used. A change in rotation speed does not influence the transferred power, only the coupling angle is of importance. The coupling angle is that part of an entire rotation when power transfer is possible. For this case, the coupling angle is 43, because 60 mW of output power is obtained during rotation and 500 mW during standstill. It should be noted that the rotating parts are not shielded, causing the wireless power link to interfere with the measurement signal. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

Receiver

Transmitter

Figure 15: Dynamic Test Setup.

Based on the different static tests, we conclude that the overall performance of the planar coil concepts is better than that of the other concepts. The planar coils, especially the square ones, are also very well suited for integration on a Printed Circuit Board (PCB). With the planar square concept, a transfer efficiency of about 80% can be reached. Passive rectification, although the most obvious option for this application, is still subject to large energy losses. The maximum rectification efficiency for this application is about 70%. Improving the rectification efficiency is directly related to the availability of better diodes optimized for operation at 27 MHz.

Figure 16: Results for End-To-End Static Measurements. When the transmitter is powered on, the buffer voltage increases until the high voltage of the On/Off circuit is reached. When this happens, the conditioning circuit is enabled and the loads are powered. The buffer voltage decreases until it reaches a stable point, which depends on the amount of transmitted power. To constantly provide the loads with 500 mW, a power of 2000 mW has to be transmitted. This results in a static end-to-end efficiency of 25%. The fifth test examines the intermittent behavior at 120 rpm. Figure 17 shows the conditioned voltages, the energy

For this application, a supercap offers the best solution to buffer differences between received and consumed power, thanks to low losses and very good dynamic properties. Switching regulators are used to condition the buffered DC signal. Although the current solution works well, efficiency is only about 50%, so a thorough redesign of this circuit can result in a considerable increase in efficiency. A transfer efficiency of 80%, a rectification efficiency of 70%, and a voltage regulation efficiency of 50% results in a total achievable efficiency of 28%. This is in agreement
1 An input power of 2000 mW is measured at optimal coupling. The input power fluctuates during rotation due to a varying coupling factor.

with the measured end-to-end efficiency of 25%. The dynamic test proves the feasibility of powering a load on a rotating shaft with only one transmitter and one receiver. Compared to static power transfer, transferred power is reduced by a factor 10 during rotation. However, a lot of improvements can still be made. These improvements go beyond the scope of this work, but are listed as topics for future research: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Reconsideration of the frequency choice, taking every part of the system into account; Research into new wire material for improved coil designs; Integration of transmitter and receiver coils on a PCB; Optimization of the efficiency of the bridge rectifier; Redesign of the voltage regulation circuitry; Addition of transmitters or receivers to increase the coupling angle; Shielding of all electronics to reduce interference from wireless power link.

Engineers , 1928, pp. 1398-1400. [9] Antonio Massarin and Marian K Kazimierczuk, "SelfCapacitance of Inductors," in IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, Dayton, 1997, pp. 671 - 676. [10] S. Eio and N.Y.A. Shammas, "Switching Transients of Power Diode," in Proceedings of the 41st International Universities Power Engineering Conference, 2006. UPEC '06., Stafford, 2006, p. 564. [11] Y.Y. Yao, D.L. Zhang, and D.G. Xu, "A Study of Supercapacitor Parameters and Characteristics," in International Conference on Power System Technology, 2006. PowerCon 2006, Shenzhen, 2006, p. 1.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We want to thank Ludo Somers for his help with all kinds of practical issues. Also, we want to thank Ren Boonen as he was able to clarify some theoretical mysteries. Finally, many thanks to Sam Buls for developing our Labview program. REFERENCES [1] S. L. Ho, Junhua Wang, W. N. Fu, and Sun Mingui, "A Comparative Study Between Novel Witricity and Traditional Inductive Magnetic Coupling in Wireless Charging," in IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Hong Kong, 2011, p. 1522. [2] David W Baarman, "Making Wireless Truly Wireless: The Need for a Universal Wireless Power Solution," Fulton Innovation, Paper 2009. [3] Wisepower. (2011, April) About Wisepower. [Online]. http://www.wisepower.it/node/1 [4] Mobile World Congress. (2011, February) Growing Wireless Carier Membership Expands Wireless Power Consortium. Publication. [5] Sony Corp. (2010, November) Sony develops highly efficient wireless power transfer system based on magnetic resonance. [Online]. http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/200910/09119E/index.html [6] Dries van Wageningen and Toine Staring, "The Qi wireless power standard," in Power Electronics and Motion Control Conference (EPE/PEMC), 2010 14th International, Germany, 2010, pp. S15-25. [7] Frederik Petr and Ludo Somers, "Draadloze vermogenoverdracht in de machinebouw," Techniline, 2007. [8] Wheeler A Harold, "Simple Inductance Formulas for Radio Coils," in Proceedings of the Institute of Radio