Voltage control to maximize the transmission efficiency of a multi‐input and multi‐output wireless power transfer system

Abstract

AbstractIn multi‐input and multi‐output (MIMO) wireless power transfer (WPT) systems, the destructive interference between multiple transmitters and receivers brings a serious impact on power transmission efficiency. This paper proposes a voltage control strategy to maximize the transmission efficiency of a MIMO WPT system by controlling the amplitude and phase of the transmitter voltages. However, the complexity of the realistic WPT circuit topology and the uncertainty in the related parameters obstruct the establishment of an accurate closed‐form description of the WPT model to optimize the transmission efficiency of the system. In this paper, a simple multi‐port network model is introduced to simulate a MIMO system to avoid the complex circuit topology and a large number of circuit elements. To determine the parameters of the proposed model, a simple yet efficient methodology, by sequentially changing the excitations of the input ports and sampling the responses at the out ports, is proposed. A voltage control methodology to optimize the transmission efficiency of a MIMO wireless power transfer system is finally developed. To validate the proposed model and voltage control methodology, a three‐input and three‐output WPT prototype is designed and fabricated and used as the experimental platform. The performances of the proposed voltage control methodology are compared to both the experimental ones and those without the proposed voltage control methodology.