Full Four Capacitor Circuit Compensation for Inductive Power Transfer

R. Azambuja, V. J. Brusamarello, S. Haffner, R. W. Porto

Electrical Engineering Department Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil Email: {ricardo.azambuja, haffner}@ieee.org, {valner.brusamarello, wolff.porto}@ufrgs.br
AbstractA novel full four capacitor compensation method for inductive power transfer is introduced. To compute the capacitors values, a very simple search algorithm based on Monte Carlo is used. In addiction, some heuristic are used to reduce the size of the search space. The efciency, output power and power efciency are compared with some classical approachs such as the two capacitors compensation and also with the basic circuit without compensation. The results showed a signicant improvement on the efciency and output power. Index TermsInductive power transfer, compensation, electromagnetic coupling, optimization, Monte Carlo.

I. I NTRODUCTION Electronic devices have seen a substantial lowering in energy consumption with the integrated circuits technology advances. However, the batteries did not become less important or dispensable and they turned into one of the heaviest components in modern portable electronic devices [1]. For instance, in implantable devices the small size of batteries is essential. In such systems the battery has a direct effect on the users life and some malfunction is a serious threat to the patients health [2]. Also, as an alternative to batteries, the use of a power cord becomes a problem due to reliability and maintenance [3]. One possible replacement to batteries or power cords is powering through magnetically coupled coils. This alternative was already broadly employed in many different applications, where a contactless power system is a necessity, like biomedical devices [4], [5], [2], instrumentation systems [6], among others [7], [8], [9]. The magnectically coupled system is usually represented by two inductances, L1 (primary side) and L2 (secondary side), and a low mutual inductance M [10]. In [8], [11], the authors presented four circuit topologies to power transfer through inductive coupling that make use of only two capacitors. The topologies are: compensation by capacitor in series with primary and secondary coils (SS), capacitor in series with primary and parallel with secondary coils (SP), capacitor parallel with primary and secondary coils (PP) and capacitor parallel to primary and in series with secondary (PS). The term compensation is about the utilization of a capacitor in series or parallel with the respective coil in a way to resonate. In [10] the authors present a compensated inductive link with only one capacitor. Additionally, a system controls the frequency of the oscillator source by means of

a wireless communication in order to adjust the maximum power on the load. Another technique, also based on seriesparallel (SP) compensation, is proposed in [12]. The authors in [13] presented an analysis between reected load theory (RLT) and coupled-mode theory (CMT) and a system compensation based on a series-parallel (SP) conguration. Although many authors tackled the subject by different methods, the complexity of the equations is a limiting factor in the analysis of a circuit compensated with more than two capacitors. This work presents an analysis of the inductive link compensated by four capacitors. First, the basic circuit without compensation is analyzed (Fig. 1). Next, a basic strategy based on a two capacitors compensation is tested. Then, the compensation of an ideal four capacitor circuit is developed. Finally, after adding all the lossy components, a search method is employed to nd the optimal capacitor values in order to reach the maximum efciency and/or output power working point. In this paper a algorithm based on Monte Carlo is presented in order to nd suboptimal capacitors values avoiding the analysis of the resulting intricated equations system. The results are improved using the frequency tunning approach described in [10] and [14]. The remaining part of the paper is structured as follows. In Section II is developed the basic methodology necessary to implement the circuits compensations. The results are presented and compared in Section III. Then the conclusions, discussions and future works are exposed in Section IV. II. M ETHODOLOGY The basic wireless power transfer system composed by two coils, L1 (primary) and L2 (secondary), the equivalent losses in the coil, R 1 (primary) and R2 (secondary) and mutual inductance M = k L1 L2 can be represented by an equivalent T circuit of a transformer model (Fig. 1), where VS is a sinusoidal source with an internal resistance RS and ZL is the load. One should notice the behavior of the circuit from Fig. 1 when the coupling coefcient k is very small. In these cases, analizing the primary side only, the inductance M can be simplied to a short circuit because j M << j L1 and j M << j L2 . Consequently the primary is not inuenced by the secondary load.

IS

R1

( L1 M )

( L2 M )

R2

IL

RS M VS + ZL

An intuitive compensation alternative, supposing the circuit of Fig. 1 without the coils resistance and with a resistive load, is to cancel all the inductances with four ideal capacitors (Fig. 2). This would let the load directly connected to the input voltage source by way of the resonance.
C2 IS ( L1 M ) ( L2 M ) C3 IL

Fig. 1. system

Transformer model equivalent T circuit of a basic wireless transfer

C1 M C4

Considering a steady state, RS = 0 and the load ZL = RL (for analysis simplications), the total efciency ( ) of the circuit of Fig. 1 is given by Eq. 1 and the output power on RL is given by Eq. 2. = 1 1+
L2 R1 k 2 L1 RL

Fig. 2. Transformer model equivalent T circuit with ideals components and four compensation capacitors

R1 (R2 +RL )2 k 2 L1 L2 RL 2

R2 RL

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Pout = Where

1/2 d1 + d2 + d3

At resonance, the capacitance C2 (Eq. 10) cancels the inductance (L1 M ), C3 (Eq. 11) the (L1 M ) and C1 and C4 (Eq. 9 and 12), the inductance M . C1 = C2 = C3 = 1 2M 2 (9) (10) (11)

2R1 (R2 + RL ) d1 = RL VS 2 R1 2 ((R2 + RL )2 + L2 2 2 ) d2 = k 2 L 1 L 2 RL VS 2 2 L1 ((R2 + RL )2 + (1 + k 2 )2 L2 2 2 ) d3 = k 2 L 2 RL V S 2

1 ( L1 M ) 2 1 ( L2 M ) 2

It is clear, from Eq. 1, that the only way to improve the total efciency ( ) without a circuit modication is to increase the frequency . When k , L1 , L2 , R1 , R2 and RL are constants, the maximum theoretical efciency will be reached when (Eq. 6). However, the power on the load goes to zero in this situation and the resulting circuit is useless. max = 1 1+
L2 R1 k 2 L1 RL

R2 RL

(6)

In addition to the total efciency ( ), the efciency of the primary (Eq. 7) and of the secondary (Eq. 8) are dened. S = P = PZL PZL + Plosses sec PVS Plosses pri PV S (7) (8)

Where PZL is the power on the load, Plosses sec is the power on the secundary lossy resistances, PVS is the total power suplied to the circuit and Plosses pri is the power on the primary lossy resistances. In previous works [10], [14], the circuit of Fig. 1 was compensated to achieve resonance and improve the power transfer and efciency. A compensation capacitor was introduced in parallel with the load. This capacitor can be modeled by a capacitance in series with an equivalent lossy resistance RC .

1 (12) 2M 2 Although the ideal capacitors lead the circuit to an ideal situation, when lossy resistors are added to the voltage source (RS ), capacitors (RC 1 to RC 4 ) and inductors (R1 and R2 ) the circuits current equations become very complicated. In spite of the fact that there is an analytical objective function (efciency or output power) it is very hard to nd an analytical equation to the optimal point. So, a numerical method is suitable to be applied in order to nd capacitor combinations that improve power output and efciency of the inductive link. The simplest search method would be an exhaustive search [15], but computationally very costly. Another simple algorithm could be based on a Monte Carlo approach. Taking samples randomly from the search space would lead to the optimal point if there are an innite number of trials [16]. With a nite number of trials, it is possible to get as near as necessary to the optimal point, depending only on the computational power available. To decrease the size of the search space, some heuristic are necessary. A very simple one, used in this work, is to limit the possible values of capacitance to 216 comercial components (based on the IEC 60063 E24 series [17] multiplied by 1012 up to 100 106 ) and xing the corresponding equivalent series lossy resistances to RC = 0.1. Through the Monte Carlo method is very easy to accomplish a multi-objective search (efciency and output C4 =

power) and nd the Pareto frontier from the calculated points with very little increase on computacional costs. The basic algorithm employed in this work is: 1) Initialize best = 0 and bestPout = 0 2) Randomly generate the values for C1 , C2 , C3 and C4 3) Calculate and Pout 4) Test if and Pout are better then best and bestPout respectively. If one test is true, store the capacitors values and update that best value variable 5) Go to 2 until reach 10,000,000 iterations There are three main characteristic to be compared between the presented compensation congurations: efciency ( ), output power (Pout ) and the product of the last two ( Pout ). This last characteristic will be called efcient power, because it is a way of measuring a joined performance avoiding congurations that results in useless circuits. III. R ESULTS This section will present the results from computed values and simulations based on the circuit parameters from the built inductive link prototype presented on Fig. 3. The parameters are: RS = 0.1, R1 = 1.8, R2 = 2.28, L1 = 218.4H and L2 = 311.4H . All capacitors, even if not mentioned in the text, have a series lossy resistance RC = 0.1. The voltage source VS is sinusoidal with Vpeak = 5V and f = 50kHz . Again, the load was simplied with ZL = RL . The main idea is to compare the efciency and output power (power on the load) of the circuit from Fig. 1 against the congurations with only two compensation capacitors (SS, SP, PS and PP), the ideal circuit four capacitor compensation Eqs. 9, 10, 11 and 12 and the full four capacitor compensation presented in this work. The circuits are evaluated with different resistive loads values RL (6.8, 47, 270, 470 and 1k ) and two coupling coefcient k (0.004 and 0.04).

They are the base values for all the comparisons with the other methods.
TABLE I C IRCUIT WITHOUT COMPENSATION Coupling k = 0.004 RL 6.8 47 270 470 1k 6.8 47 270 470 1k 39.8 221 182 114 55.7 3.96m 21.6m 17.9m 11.3m 5.54m Pout 201nW 1.12W 919nW 576nW 281nW 20.1W 112W 91.9W 57.6W 28.1W Pout 7.99pW 247pW 168pW 65.7pW 15.7pW 79.8nW 2.42W 1.65W 650nW 156nW

k = 0.04

B. Circuits with only two compensation capacitors In this conguration, the circuit of Fig. 1 was compensated using the topologies: (SS) Series-Series, (SP) Series-Parallel, (PP) Parallel-Parallel and (PS) Parallel-Series. The values from Table II were calculated from a exhaustive search using the 216 possibles comercial capacitors as mentioned in the last section. They are the best values found with the numerical method applied in this work and each column is a two capacitor match, i.e., the resulting capacitors computed for are independent of the capacitors computed for Pout or Pout . The best results for the same range of resistive loads are marked in bold. C. Ideal circuit with four capacitor compensation In this conguration, the circuit of Fig. 1 was employed, but with the compensation capacitors arrangement from Fig. 2. The results, presented in Table III, were computed from Eq. 9 to 12 and rounded to the nearest comercial E24 value [17]. D. Circuit with full four capacitor compensation In this conguration, the circuit of Fig. 1 was employed with the compensation capacitors conguration from Fig. 2. The results presented in Table IV were computed from the Monte Carlo method described in the Section II. The columns are independent, i.e., the capacitors values that lead to the best are not the same as the capacitors values that lead to the best Pout or Pout . Comparisons with the previous methods are presented below. 1) Efciency: The averaged values reached with this conguration were almost 50 times larger than the circuit without compensation (Section III-A, Table I). Compared to the compensation with two capacitors (Section III-B, Table II), an average improvement of more than 200% was achieved. Against the four capacitors ideal circuit (Section III-C, Table III), the average gain was about 500 times. In some systems, such as implantable devices, is also very important to know how much power is dissipated on the lossy resistances in the secondary, because they are the parts implanted in the patient - the heat is easier exchanged in the primary side than in the secondary. The circuit was simulated (on SPICE) with the same capacitors

Fig. 3. Prototype built with Litz wire to support variable coupling measurements

A. Circuit without compensation In this conguration, the circuit of Fig. 1 was evaluated and the values from Table I were computed from Eq. 1 and 2.

TABLE IV C IRCUIT WITH FULL FOUR CAPACITOR COMPENSATION TABLE II C IRCUIT WITH TWO CAPACITOR COMPENSATION Coupling k = 0.004 RL 6.8 6.8 6.8 6.8 47 47 47 47 270 270 270 270 470 470 470 470 1k 1k 1k 1k 6.8 6.8 6.8 6.8 47 47 47 47 270 270 270 270 470 470 470 470 1k 1k 1k 1k 4.22m 38 4.56m 41.1 1.03m 257 1.12m 278 195 1.33m 211 1.43m 113 2.1m 122 2.27m 53.4 3.53m 57.8 3.82m 270m 3.78m 283m 4.09m 93.3m 25.1m 100m 27m 19.2m 116m 20.7m 124m 11.2m 170m 12.1m 181m 5.32m 245m 5.74m 259m Pout 22mW 199W 22.5W 202nW 5.39mW 1.34mW 5.49W 1.37W 1.02mW 6.92mW 1.04W 7.05W 591W 11mW 600nW 11.2W 279W 18.4mW 284nW 18.8W 1.02W 20.5mW 2.26mW 20.2W 454mW 133mW 549W 137W 98.8mW 549mW 104W 707W 58mW 784mW 60W 1.12mW 27.7mW 1W 28.4W 1.89mW Pout 92.6W 7.55nW 103nW 8.28pW 5.57W 346nW 6.13nW 380pW 199nW 9.18W 219pW 10.1nW 66.8nW 23W 73.4pW 25.3nW 14.9nW 64.9W 16.4pW 71.8nW 275mW 77.3W 640W 82.7nW 42.4mW 3.34mW 54.9W 3.71W 1.89mW 66.1mW 2.14W 87.8W 648W 133mW 725nW 203W 147W 245mW 163nW 489W Type SS SP PS PP SS SP PS PP SS SP PS PP SS SP PS PP SS SP PS PP SS SP PS PP SS SP PS PP SS SP PS PP SS SP PS PP SS SP PS PP Coupling k = 0.004 RL 6.8 47 270 470 1k 6.8 47 270 470 1k 4.91m 5.4m 5.43m 5.4m 5.49m 282m 279m 281m 284m 282m Pout 24.4mW 27.3mW 25.7mW 27.4mW 27.8mW 1.02W 992mW 984mW 981mW 1W Pout 115W 143W 127W 145W 149W 275mW 273mW 240mW 271mW 269mW

k = 0.04

k = 0.004

k = 0.004

k = 0.004

k = 0.004

k = 0.04

k = 0.04

k = 0.04

k = 0.04

values utilized to compute the graph of Fig. 4. The total power dissipated in the secondary, excluding RL , was 8.2mW and 24.4mW the efciency S = 24.4mW +8.2mW = 0.75. Even though the total efciency stayed near 0.005, the secondary proved to be 15,000% more efcient than the primary. 2) Output Power: The resulting output power with the full four capacitor compensation was, at least, 8862 times (or 886,200%) bigger than the one from the basic circuit, without compensation (Section III-A, Table I). Compared to the circuit with only two compensation capacitors (Section III-B, Table II), it had an average improvement of more than 200%. The ideal four capacitor compensation results (Section III-C, Table III) were, in average, 282 times (or 28,200%) smaller than with the full four capacitor compensation. The capacitors values that resulted in the Pout s column (in bold) from Table IV are presented in Table V. These data allowed to test the behavior of the circuit when the frequency is scanned and even simulate the circuit in a software such as SPICE.
TABLE V C APACITOR VALUES FOR TABLE IV Pout COLUMN Coupling k = 0.004 RL 6.8 47 270 470 1k 6.8 47 270 470 1k C1 82pF 1pF 36nF 11pF 15nF 43nF 2.4nF 9.1nF 430pF 22pF C2 47nF 47nF 47nF 47nF 47nF 47nF 47nF 47nF 47nF 47nF C3 33nF 36nF 47nF 51nF 68nF 33nF 39nF 68nF 110nF 430nF C4 330nF 330nF 110nF 91nF 62nF 1.1pF 180nF 62nF 47nF 36nF

k = 0.04

k = 0.04

TABLE III
IDEAL CIRCUIT WITH FOUR CAPACITOR COMPENSATION

Coupling k = 0.004

k = 0.04

RL 6.8 47 270 470 1k 6.8 47 270 470 1k

269 42.1 7.4 4.25 2 262m 89.1m 18.2m 10.6m 5.05m

Pout 2.46mW 384W 67.6W 38.9W 18.3W 774mW 233mW 45.2mW 26.2mW 12.4mW

Pout 662nW 16.2nW 500pW 165pW 36.6pW 203mW 20.7mW 823W 278W 62.6W

The relation between Pout and frequency with the values of capacitors from Table V (in bold) is presented in Fig. 4. The dot mark shows, in the graph, the Pout point where the frequency is 50kHz . In previous works [10], [14] the frequency was tunned to reach the resonance and to improve the system response. The same procedure was applied in this paper. Moving the frequency to 49787Hz the output power over the load increase from 24.4mW to 26.4mW , in other words, about an 8% improvement. 3) Power efciency: The computed values were, in average, 3 106 times bigger than the values from the circuit without

P@WD 0.025

R EFERENCES
[1] J. O. Mur-Miranda, G. Fanti, Y. Feng, K. Omanakuttan, R. Ongie, A. Setjoadi, and N. Sharpe, Wireless power transfer using weakly coupled magnetostatic resonators, in Proc. Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE), 2010 IEEE. Atlanta: IEEE, Sept. 2010, pp. 41794186. [2] R. Harrison, Designing efcient inductive power links for implantable devices, in Proc. IEEE Intl. Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS 2007). New Orleans: IEEE, June 2007, pp. 20802083. [3] P. Si, A. P. Hu, and S. Malpas, A frequency control method for regulating wireless power to implantable devices, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems, vol. 2, pp. 2229, 2008. [4] J. Olivo, S. Carrara, and G. D. Micheli, Ironic patch: A wearable device for the remote powering and connectivity of implantable systems, in Proc. Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (I2MTC), 2012 IEEE International. Graz: IEEE, July 2012, pp. 286 290. [5] P. Li and R. Bashirullah, A wireless power interface for rechargeable battery operated medical implants, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems Part II : Express Briefs, vol. 54, no. 10, pp. 912916, Oct. 2007. [6] J. de Boeij, E. Lomonova, J. L. Duarte, and A. J. A. Vandenput, Contactless power supply for moving sensors and actuators in highprecision mechatronic systems with long-stroke power transfer capability in x-y plane, Sensors and Actuators A: Physical, vol. 148, no. 1, pp. 319328, Nov. 2008. [7] C.-G. Kim, D.-H. Seo, J.-S. You, J.-H. Park, and B. H. Cho, Design of a contactless battery charger for cellular phone, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, vol. 48, pp. 12381247, 2001. [8] C.-S. Wang, O. H. Stielau, and G. A. Covic, Design considerations for a contactless electric vehicle battery charger, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, vol. 52, pp. 1308 1314, 2005. [9] T. Bieler, M. Perrottet, V. Nguyen, and Y. Perriard, Contactless power and information transmission, IEEE Transactions On Industry Applications, vol. 38, no. 5, pp. 12661272, Sept. 2001. [10] V. J. Brusamarello, Y. B. Blauth, R. Azambuja, and I. Muller, A study on inductive power transfer with wireless tuning, in Proc. Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (I2MTC), 2012 IEEE International. Graz: IEEE, July 2012, pp. 1098 1103. [11] C.-S. Wang, O. Stielau, and G. Covic, Load models and their application in the design of loosely coupled inductive power transfer systems, in Proc. International Conference on Power System Technology, 2000. Proceedings. PowerCon 2000, vol. 2. Perth: IEEE, December 2000, pp. 1053 1058. [12] Y.-H. Chao, J.-J. Shieh, C.-T. Pan, W.-C. Shen, and M.-P. Chen, A primary-side control strategy for series-parallel loosely coupled inductive power transfer systems, in Proc. 2nd IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applications, 2007. ICIEA 2007. Harbin: IEEE, May 2007, pp. 2322 2327. [13] M. Kiani and M. Ghovanloo, The circuit theory behind coupledmode magnetic resonance-based wireless power transmission, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, vol. 59, no. 8, Aug. 2012. [14] V. J. Brusamarello, Y. B. Blauth, R. Azambuja, I. Muller, and F. R. de Sousa, Power transfer with an inductive link and wireless tuning, 2013, iEEE Transactions on Instrumentation & Measurement. [15] H. A. Taha, Operations Research: An Introduction, 8th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2010. [16] J. S. Bendat and A. G. Piersol, Random Data: Analysis and Measurement Procedures, 4th ed. New Jersey: Wiley, 2010. [17] Preferred Number Series for Resistors and Capacitors, IEC 60063, IEC Std. IEC 60 063, 1963.

0.020

0.015

0.010

0.005 f @HzD

48 000

50 000

52 000

54 000

Fig. 4.

Pout as a function of frequency with k = 0.004 and RL = 6.8

compensation (Section III-A, Table I). Compared with the two capacitors compensation (Section III-B, Table II), the results had and average improvement of more than 600%. With the ideal four capacitor compensation (Section III-C, Table III), the comparisons showed, in average, a boost of about 518 thousands times. IV. C ONCLUSION AND D ISCUSSIONS In this paper, a novel full four capacitor compensation method for inductive power transfer was introduced. The capacitors values were computed using a search algorithm based on Monte Carlo. The efciency, output power and power efciency, obtained from the application of the best values fond, were compared with some classical approachs such as the two capacitors compensation and, also, with the basic circuit without compensation. The method presented in this work showed a signicant improvement on the efciency and output power compared with the basic circuit without compensation. Contrasting with the two compensation capacitors conguration (III-B, Table II) proved that is possible to get an average boost above 200%. Also the secondary efciency, a serious issue considering implantable devices, hit 75% with a coupling coefcient of only 0.004 in one case simulated with SPICE. According to the algorithm presented in Section II, the 1 chance of hitting the optimal point is 216 4 10,000,000 or only 0.46%. Supposing there are a hundred suboptimal points, the chances to hit one of those points increase to 46%. Therefore a clear continuation to this work is to study a search method with better results than the method utilized here. Another possible extension to this work is to inspect the effect of capacitor C1 on the circuit because the output power results from Table V showed some randomness without a clear tendency. Finally, the theoretical and simulated results should be confronted with measurements made with the help of the inductive link prototype showed in Fig. 3. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was in part supported by the CAPES (Brazil).