Development of Wireless Energy Transfer Module for Solar Energy Harvesting

Abstract

A module of wireless energy transfer (WET) has been developed to interact with the ambient solar energy. The main idea of the module development is to distribute the collected electrical energy from a solar panel module to in house loads appliances wirelessly. The solar panel module has been identified to have 240W, 30 V, Poly Crystalline Silicon Photovoltaic solar panel with 60 cells. The design of WET module is based on magnetic resonance technology, which employed two sub-unit modules development; driving circuit and two coils mutually inducted to transfer energy in a suitable resonant frequency. Class-D RF power amplifier has been used as the driving circuit for transmitted coil switching which has an advantage of nearly 99% efficiency theoretically. Three types of coils have been developed; there are circular coil, flat spiral coil and flat Rodin coil. High quality factor Q (>100) of each coil is designed to minimize the power dissipation in coil. With the highest efficiency of the wireless energy transfer module, the energy collected by photovoltaic solar panel can be transferred with nearly zero of its losses and higher wireless transmission distance. Results have shown that, flat spiral coil have higher efficiency with longer distance of transmission that can be achieved compare to the other designs. The maximum distance of transmission is 26 cm with an efficiency of 80% at quality factor 272.62. Based on the results it has been proven that using the coil with a high factor Q and coupling coefficient at matched resonant frequency leads to a bigger energy transfer with a greater distance. Experimental results show that, optimal efficiency of the designed system can be achieved with circular loop coil is 45.25% at factor Q 413.62, while 36.5% at factor Q 264.63.