Optimal Design of a 3-Coil Wireless Power Transfer System for Deep Micro-Implants

Abstract

This paper presents a design methodology for a 3-coil magnetic resonance wireless power transfer (WPT) system with a long transfer distance (up to 20 cm) and a small implanted receiver (RX) (2mm in diameter) at a specific frequency. The methodology aims to find out the optimal value of dimensional parameters (i.e., coil diameter, gap interval and coil turn number) of the transmitter (TX) coils to maximize the magnetic field strength at the target distance while keeping the coil self-resonant frequency (SRF) twice of the target operational frequency. Firstly, the circuit model of the TX circuits is developed, which include a single-turn coupling coil and a multi-turn primary coil. Secondly, the co-dependences between the dimensional parameters are analyzed, which shows the dominant factors and secondary factors of each dimensional parameter, and how the optimal values of dimensional parameters are changed by these factors. Based on the analysis, design flow of the TX circuit is proposed to decide the optimal values of dimensional parameters given the transfer distance, source voltage, operational frequency and wire diameter. Using the design flow, optimal values of dimensional parameters are predicted for 20-cm transfer distance and 16-cm transfer distance and are verified with finite element analysis (FEA) software COMSOL Multiphysics. With the optimal TX design, the power received by a 2-mm ferrite core solenoid RX is calculated. At 20 cm transfer distance, up to 4.3 mW can be achieved in air, and 0.8 mW can be achieved in conductive human tissue.