Abstract
The authors have studied analytically by simulation and by experiment the impact of a conducting medium on the mutual inductance between two coils, in particular as related to the attenuation of magneto-inductive (MI) waves. To illustrate the physics, the distributions of both the magnetic field and the Poynting vector are determined. They show that the plane wave approach used in the literature for the theoretical description of MI attenuation has only limited validity. It is further found that the mutual inductance becomes a complex quantity, its modulus declining monotonically as a function of conductivity or medium thickness. Their results will be relevant for the design and optimisation of MI waveguide links in conducting media, in general, and particularly when the attenuation is caused by soil conductivity. The results can also be useful for practical applications including in vivo communication and wireless power transfer for medical implants.
Highlights
It has been known ever since the work of Faraday and Oersted that currents flowing in a coil could produce a magnetic field and a time-varying magnetic field can induce currents in another coil – electromagnetic (EM) induction
We have studied magnetoinductive (MI) waveguides in the past [2] exploiting this property for wideband communications and considered wireless power transfer via the same structures [3]
The aim of the present paper is to investigate the impact of a conducting medium on the mutual inductance between two coils going beyond previous studies by including retardation into the equations, by using simulations and by going into the details of the physics
Summary
It has been known ever since the work of Faraday and Oersted that currents flowing in a coil could produce a magnetic field and a time-varying magnetic field can induce currents in another coil – electromagnetic (EM) induction. This principle has led to many technologies including transformers, motors, generators and more recently near-field communications [1]. They consist of a set of resonant coils mostly arranged in a linear array. Various devices made up by MI waveguides were considered in [13]
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