3200

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 47, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2011

Quantitative Analysis of a Wireless Power Transfer Cell With Planar Spiral Structures
Xiu Zhang, S. L. Ho, and W. N. Fu
Department of Electrical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnical University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong
An emerging technology of wireless power transfer technique based on electromagnetic resonant coupling, also known as witricity, has been drawing a lot of attention from academia as well as from practitioners since it was reported in 2007 by a group of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In this paper, a prototype with square planar spiral structure based on witricity is proposed. To compute the resonant frequency, an equivalent circuit model is presented and simulated. The impedance matrix is computed by using a formula method and a 3-D nite-element method (FEM) of eddy-current magnetic eld. The results indicate that the numerical method has a better accuracy. In order to reduce the resonant frequency, different conditions are analyzed quantitatively to study the relationship between the parameters and the relation of the prototypes with their resonant frequencies. The ndings are found to offer a solid foundation for the optimization of witricity prototypes. Index TermsEddy-current magnetic eld, equivalent circuit, impedance matrix, planar spiral inductor, resonant frequency, wireless power transfer.

I. INTRODUCTION DVANCES in power electronics and magnetic materials have made it possible to replace conventional energy transmission using wires by contactless couplings in many applications. Since the invention of the Tesla coil [1], researchers from all over the world have made many attempts, including near-eld transmission based on magnetic coupling and far-eld transmission using microwaves and lasers, to improve the technology of wireless power transfer [2]. In essence, the success of wireless power transfer is dependent on whether high power can be transmitted through a relatively long distance in an efcient manner [3]. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) research team has presented a power transfer mechanism and they have successfully transferred 60 W of power over a distance in excess of 2 m with efciencies up to 40% [4]. It has been named witricity as in wireless electricity. Witricity is a new technology of electromagnetic resonant coupling which satises the aforementioned requirements for transmitting power over midrange distances based on strongly coupled magnetic resonance. As an efcient wireless nonradiative midrange energy transfer method, witricity has triggered a lot of interests for charging popular electronic devices such as laptops, cell phones, robots, and PDAs, which all require frequent charging. Witricity technique also has many medical applications. Today, many microelectronic devices are implanted within human body. Hitherto, replacement of implanted batteries poses a major health risk. To address such shortcoming and use a technique along the direction of witricity, a research team at the University of Pittsburgh has proposed a wireless power transfer (WPT) system to demonstrate the feasibility of transmitting power to implantable devices and sensors [2].
Manuscript received February 19, 2011; accepted April 20, 2011. Date of current version September 23, 2011. Corresponding author: X. Zhang (e-mail: 09901605R@polyu.edu.hk). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TMAG.2011.2147768

The basic witricity system consists of two resonators which operate with the same resonance frequency; one as the source loop and the other as the device loop. The source loop is connected to an alternating current (ac) power source. It generates an oscillating magnetic eld over the surroundings of the device loop which is brought to the vicinity of the source loop. When the device loop captures the oscillating magnetic eld, it picks up electromotive force to circulate a current in the connected load. In this paper, an equivalent circuit of a wireless power transfer system with planar spiral structures is presented. The parameters of the circuit are computed using both analytical method and a nite-element method (FEM). Their accuracies are compared with experimental results. The resonance frequency of the system is computed according to the circuit. The developed model is used to study the effects of changes in the design parameters and the physical connections quantitatively. It has been used to design the WPT system operating at the optimal resonance frequency which is dependent on the shapes and sizes of the prototypes. II. COMPUTATION OF IMPEDANCE MATRIX Based on the WPT system, a planar spiral inductor is chosen to form the basic structure of the prototype [5]. In terms of layout simplicity, the square spiral inductor becomes the rst choice among the various kinds of layouts including square, hexagonal, octagonal, and circular. In order to describe the characteristics of the inductor, a mathematical model is required. The key factor to establish the model is to include the effects of eddy current and relevant parasitic capacitances. In the simulation, the two methods are used to compute the inductances and resistances. A. Formula Method The mathematical model should consist of 1) series reand inductances of the spiral conductor, sistances between the spiral and the 2) crossover capacitance center-tap, 3) capacitance between the spiral and the substrate , 4) substrate ohmic loss, and 5) substrate resistance

0018-9464/$26.00 2011 IEEE

ZHANG et al.: QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF A WIRELESS POWER TRANSFER CELL WITH PLANAR SPIRAL STRUCTURES

3201

Fig. 1. (a) The circuit model of a spiral inductor. (b) The sketch map of the inductor.

Fig. 2. (a) The basic structure of the prototype. (b) One loop of the prototype showing the segment of the conductor.

and capacitance [6]. The circuit model of a spiral inductor is shown in Fig. 1. The inductance of the square spiral is computed using the Wheeler formula [5] (1) where is the number of turns; is the permeability of free space; and are coefcients depending on the shapes of the coils; they are equal to 2.34 and 2.75, respectively, for coils having a square shape; is the ll ratio dened as , where and represent the inner and outer diameters of the inductor, respectively. Under direct current (dc) excitation, the current density in a wire is uniform, and could be obtained by the product of resistance per unit length and wire length. However, as frequency increases, the current tends to ow on the surface of the wire because of skin effect and proximity effect and thus the effective resistance is increased. To address eddy-current effect, the most crucial parameter is the skin depth which is dened as (2) , and represent the resistivity in , permeability where in H/m, and frequency in Hz, respectively. The series resistance can be expressed as [6] (3) where and represent the thickness and length of the wire, respectively. In view of the parasitic capacitive coupling between input and output ports of the inductor, the capacitance is the sum of all overlap capacitances, which is equal to (4) where is the oxide thickness between the spiral and underpass; is the permittivity of the oxide which is equal to 3.45 10 F/cm; and is the number of overlap. The oxide capacitance , and substrate capacitance and resistance and can be, respectively, expressed as [6] (5) (6) (7)

where and are the conductance and capacitance per unit area for the substrate. B. Computation of the Inductance Matrix Using FEM Since the planar spiral inductor has a multiconductor structure, the eddy currents are also induced by currents in other segments due to proximity and skin effects. To study the effect of magnetic mutual coupling, an eddy-current magnetic eld solver based on 3-D FEM is employed [6]. By using the parameter extraction method presented by Fu and Ho [7], an impedance matrix including self inductance of each segment conductors, mutual inductance among segments of conductors, and the other mutual inductance between the two loops of the system can be computed precisely. After the impedance matrix is obtained with the aforementioned two methods, the Simulink of Matlab are used to plot the graphs to describe the trends of impedances in the equivalent circuit that vary with frequency in order to help nding the resonance frequency of the circuit. III. EQUIVALENT CIRCUIT OF THE PROTOTYPE The prototype is constructed on the basis of a thin plastic lamella with a permittivity which serves as the insulator as shown in Fig. 2(a). On the one side of the plastic lamella, a copper tape is applied to form a square planar spiral inductor. On the other side, four strips of the same size are afxed along the axis of the four borders of the inductor. These copper strips cover all the turns of the opposite copper tapes to form capacitors. In order to apply the witricity system to different situations, the size of the source loop and the device loop should be different but their resonance frequencies are the same. To ensure the resonance frequencies of the two loops are identical, special efforts are needed before the model can be made in laboratory. The use of an equivalent circuit of the prototype is an effective method to dealing with this problem. Observing from Fig. 2(b), the whole inductor is segmented into several sections by the copper strips making up the capacitors. The numbers of resistors, inductors, and capacitors are 4 , and respectively, where represents the number of turns in the inductor. The capacitors along the same border are connected together. The basic equivalent circuit of one loop is shown in Fig. 3. In the simulation, the inductance of each segment includes the self-inductance and two kinds of mutual inductance which are

3202

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 47, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2011

TABLE I RESONANT FREQUENCY OF THE PROTOTYPE

Fig. 3. The equivalent circuit of the basic prototype.

Fig. 5. Inuence of different parameters to resonance frequency.

Fig. 4. (a) Graph of impedance versus frequency simulated using the formula method. (b) Graph of impedance versus frequency simulated with FEM.

the mutual inductance among each segment and the mutual inductance between the two loops of the system. Between port 1 and port 2, the parameters of , and are all included as shown in Fig. 1(a). All the simulations are based on the structure of the prototype as shown in Fig. 2(a). The width and thickness of the copper tape are 6.35 mm and 0.04 mm, respectively. The model is composed of six turns with an inner diameter of 114 mm and an outer diameter of 208 mm. The thickness of the middle plastic lamella is 0.1 mm, and the width of the copper stripes making up the capacitors is 25.5 mm. IV. ANALYSIS AND RESULT With the rst approach, the inductances are calculated using a formula, and it is divided into several parts according to the length of each segment. The equivalent circuit is simulated using Simulink. The graph of the impedance which is observed from the terminals of the equivalent circuit versus frequency is shown in Fig. 4(a). Reducing the resonance frequency to make it as low as possible is the primary consideration in this research study. Along this direction, the rst resonance frequency thus found is as shown in Fig. 4(a). Alternatively, the 3-D model of eddy-current magnetic eld is solved using FEM. The conductors of the wire are split into several parts and the impedance matrix is extracted and the values of each element are put into the equivalent circuit. Then the resonant frequency is computed as shown in Fig. 4(b). The value of this prototype is 65.6. Observing from Fig. 4(b), the impedance of the equivalent circuit reaches its maximum value at 4.63 MHz and this is the rst resonant frequency. With the prototype depicted in Fig. 2(a), it is found experimentally that the resonating wireless power transfer occurs at

about 5.01 MHz. The input effective voltage is 5 V and the effective current is about 0.150.2 A. As the transmitted power is sufcient to light up an LED (0.2 W0.8 W), the efciency is estimated to be at least 20%. Table I compares the resonant frequencies from two simulation methods and actual measurement. It can be observed that the difference between the magnetic eld simulation and measurement result is below 8%, which indicates that the method of eld simulation has a higher accuracy than the formula method. Therefore, the following analysis will use the eld simulation only. For witricity to be used successfully in different applications, it is important to ensure the prototypes are designed with appropriate sizes to cater for the needs of different applications. In addition, the resonant frequency of the source and device loops should be the same in order to facilitate efcient transfer of energy from the source loop to the device loop. Moreover, it is worth noting that there are many factors inuencing the resonant frequency which are dependent on the parameters of the prototypes, the different connection ways and so on. In this paper, the relationship between each factor and the resonant frequency are studied in details and several aspects will be analyzed. A. Parameters of Prototype Versus Resonant Frequency In order to investigate the relationship between resonance frequency and the parameters of the prototype, two important parameters including the width of the capacitor and the inner diameter of the inductor are analyzed using the developed equivalent circuit. Obviously, the resonance frequency varies with capacitance. Fig. 5 indicates qualitatively the trend between the width of the capacitors and resonant frequency. It can be seen that the resonant frequency is reduced as the width of the capacitors increases. The inner diameter is the key parameter which affects the size of the prototype. In the simulation, the inner diameter of the prototype with six turns is varied from 60 to 200 mm in steps of 10 mm. Fig. 5 shows the resonant frequency obtained by simulation with different inner diameters.

ZHANG et al.: QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF A WIRELESS POWER TRANSFER CELL WITH PLANAR SPIRAL STRUCTURES

3203

more than 50% when compared to the resonating frequency of 4.63 MHz. The corresponding -factor is 103.3. C. Add a Single-Turn Coil Versus Resonant Frequency The third method to alter the resonant frequency is to place a single-turn copper coil in the vicinity of the basic prototype with a 1-mm distance. The basic parameters of the coil include a 200-mm major diameter and a 10-mm minor diameter. Due to the mutual inductance between the coil and the original prototype, the resonant frequency of the new prototype is expected to be lower. Indeed the simulation result is 4.25 MHz which is 7% smaller when compared with that of the basic prototype without a coil. The -factor value is 92.1. In this prototype, the single-turn coil serves as a transformer, and the output voltage is increased by 20% as veried experimentally. V. CONCLUSION To compute the resonant frequency of the prototype, an equivalent circuit is presented and evaluated by comparing the computed ndings with those obtained experimentally. It is found that the impedance matrix computed using 3-D eld computation has higher precision than that of the formula method. The equivalent circuit is also convenient and efcient in obtaining the resonant frequency. Several different situations have been simulated using the equivalent circuit based on parameters which are extracted from eddy-current magnetic eld computation. It provides the foundation for nding the optimal designs of the prototypes that operate at a lower resonant frequency as far as possible so as to reduce the electromagnetic pollutions to the environment. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was supported by the Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong SAR Government under Project PolyU 5184/ 09E. REFERENCES
[1] N. Tesla, Apparatus for transmitting electrical energy, U.S. Patent 1 119 732, 1902. [2] X. Y. Liu, F. Zhang, S. A. Hackworth, R. J. Sclabassi, and M. G. Sun, Modeling and simulation of a thin lm power transfer cell for medical devices and implants, in Proc. IEEE Int. Symp. Circuits Syst., Taipei, Taiwan, May 2427, 2009, pp. 30863089. [3] T. Imura, H. I. Okabe, and Y. Hori, Basic experimental study on helical antennas of wireless power transfer for electric vehicles by using magnetic resonant couplings, in Proc. IEEE Veh. Power Propulsion Conf., 2009, pp. 936940. [4] A. Kurs, A. Karalis, R. Moffatt, J. D. Joannopoulos, P. Fisher, and M. Soljacic, Wireless power transfer via strongly coupled magnetic resonances, Science, vol. 317, pp. 8386, Jul. 2007. [5] S. Sunderarajan, M. del M. H. Mohan, S. P. Boyd, and T. H. Lee, Simple accurate expressions for planar spiral inductances, IEEE J. Solid Solid-State Circuit, vol. 34, no. 10, pp. 14191424, Oct. 1999. [6] C. P. Yue and S. S. Wong, Physical modeling of spiral inductors on silicon, IEEE Trans. Electron Devices, vol. 47, no. 3, pp. 560568, Mar. 2000. [7] W. N. Fu and S. L. Ho, A direct circuit parameter extraction method of eddy-current magnetic eld, in Proc. CEFC, Chicago, IL, May 912, 2010, p. 1.

Fig. 6. (a) All the capacitors connected together. (b) The impedance versus frequency.

Fig. 7. (a) All the capacitors are connected together and then connected to the outermost turn of the inductor. (b) The impedance versus frequency.

Fig. 8. (a) With a single-turn copper coil in the vicinity of the basic prototype. (b) The impedance versus frequency.

In general, the resonant frequency is dependent directly on the variation of the parameters. From the trend of the two curves, the capacitor plays a more important role in this model. For future research, those changes that combine two or three different parameters will be analyzed so as to nd an ideal prototype with suitable size and low resonant frequency. B. Different Connection Versus Resonant Frequency To the prototype, there are a number of different connection methods based on the square spiral structure. In order to facilitate the display, only one loop is shown in the following. In fact, the two loops have the same connection method. Fig. 6 indicates one connection which connects all the capacitors together. The resonant frequency is 4.01 MHz which is smaller when compared with the rst resonating frequency of the same basic structure. The -factor value is 148.8. Another connection is to connect all capacitors together and then connect the capacitor to the outermost turn of the inductor, as shown in Fig. 7. In this connection, the resonant frequency is about 2.03 MHz which means the resonance frequency has been decreased by