Data Transmission for Resonant-type Wireless

Power Transfer
Shinpei Noguchi, Mamiko Inamori, Yukitoshi Sanada
Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Keio University, Yokohama, 223-8522 Japan
Email:anoguchi@snd.elec.keio.ac.jp, {inamori,sanada}@elec.keio.ac.jp

AbstractWireless power transfer research has been receiving

a great deal of attention in recent years. In resonant-type
wireless power transfer, energy is transferred via LC resonant
circuits. However, system performance is dependent on the
circuit components. To transfer power safely, information, such
as frequency, required power and element values, need to be
transmitted initially in the system. This paper investigates data
communication using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM) modulation in resonant-type wireless power transfer
systems. The equivalent circuit used in the transmitting and
receiving antennas is a band pass filter (BPF) and its bandwidth is
evaluated through circuit simulations and experimental measurements. Numerical results obtained through computer simulation
show that the bit error rate (BER) performance is affected by
the mismatch of resonant frequency.

I. I NTRODUCTION
Recent interest in wireless power transfer has been attracting
a great deal of attention. Wireless power transfer will enable
advances in the use of electronic devices such as mobile
phones, portable computers, etc.. The wireless power transfer
is currently achieved via three techniques, each system has
different characteristics in terms of distance and power transfer
efficiency.
The three techniques are electromagnetic induction, coupled
radio frequency power transmission, and resonant coupling.
In electromagnetic induction, the magnetic flux induces the
electric current, thus power is transferred wirelessly to the received coil [1]. The efficiency of power transfer varies between
60-98% over a distance of several millimeters. To achieve
coupled radio frequency power transmission, electromagnetic
waves are converted to direct currents, which provides power
[2]. The efficiency of power transfer is less than 50% over a
distance of several meters. In the resonant coupling technique,
two coils are tuned at the same resonant frequency, the power
transfer is expected to be very efficient. The efficiency of
power transfer is approximately 50% over a distance of several
tens of centimeters [3]. In 2006, MIT has released WiTricity,
which applies this resonant induction [4]. In this paper, the
magnetic resonant coupling system is modeled for wireless
power transfer.
The transmitting and receiving antennas in the coupled
resonances need to create non-radiative and induced magnetic
field easily. As a practical realization, the loop antennas can
be applied. The antennas tend to change the induced magnetic
field with the number of turns [5]. However, the self-resonant
coils rely on the interplay between distributed conductance

and distributed capacitance, which results in the effect on the

power transfer efficiency. Therefore, the circuit information in
the receiver such as frequency, required power and element
values need to be transmitted to the transmitter according to
the request of the receiver [6][7]. It becomes very important
for wireless power transfer systems to make sure that these
data are transmitted reliably. The equivalent circuit used in the
transmitting and receiving antennas is a band pass filter (BPF)
and its bandwidth is evaluated through circuit simulations and
experiments. In this paper, the transfer function |S21 | as measured experimentally and as calculated from the circuit model
are evaluated. The bandwidth to transmit the data information
then is decided. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM) is applied as a modulation scheme and bit error rate
(BER) is calculated through MATLAB simulation.
This paper is organized as follows. Section II introduces the
system model and Section III outlines the experimental setup.
In Section IV, numerical results obtained through computer
simulation are presented. Section V gives our conclusions and
directions for future work.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
A. Single Antenna

Thickness

Diameter

Fig. 1.

C0

Single antenna.

Rr

L1
C1

Fig. 2.

Equivalent circuit of antenna.

In this paper, 3-turn coil is applied as shown in Fig. 1 as

a transmitting and receiving antenna, whose equivalent circuit

is shown in Fig. 2 [5]. In the single antenna in Fig. 2, L1

represents the self inductance, Rr represents the radiation
resistance of a coil, C0 represents the stray capacitance, and
C1 represents the load capacitance. The conductor losses are
ignored in the circuit model. From Neumanns formula, the
self inductance, L1 , is given as
II
d`1 d`2
0
,
(1)
L1 =
4 1 2 r12
where d`1 and d`2 are small line elements on a coil, and r12
is the thickness of the coil. The radiation resistance of a coil,
Rr , is given as
Rr = 20 2 q 2 (p)4 ,

(2)

where is the phase constant, q is the number of turns, and

p is the radius of a coil. The diameter of the coil, D, is 27cm
and the thickness is 4.5mm in experimental model. From the
self-resonant frequency f0 in the experimental model, the stray
capacitance between lines, C0 , is given from
f0 =

.
2 L1 C0

The equivalent circuit of this system is shown in Fig. 4. Z0

is set to 50. From Neumanns formula, the mutual inductance
between the antennas is given as
II
dL1 dL2
0
,
(4)
M=
4 1 2
dz
and
M

L1 L2 ,

(5)

where dz is the distance between antennas, k is the coupling

coefficient, and L2 is the self inductance of the receiving
antenna [8]. From Eqs. (4) and (5), the coupling coefficient,
k, is calculated as shown in Fig. 5. With the value for the
coupling coefficient, k, and Eq. (5), the transfer function, |S21 |,
which represents the power transfer efficiency, is calculated
from the circuit model.
1
0.9

(3)

0.8
0.7

In this paper, the load capacitance, C1 , is determined since the

resonant frequency fc is set to 10[MHz]. The values of each
parameter of this model are shown in Table I.

0.6
k

TABLE I

= k

0.5
0.4

PARAMETERS IN SINGLE ANTENNA

0.3

Rr [m]
1.731

L1 [H]
7.6

C1 [pF ]
15

0.2

C0 [pF ]
20

0.1
0

10

20

30

B. Resonant Coupling System

Fig. 5.

Receiving antenna

40

dz[cm]

50

60

70

80

Coupling coefficient vs. distance between two antennas

dy

C. Communication Model

dz

In the communication model for data transmission, the

equivalent circuit used in the transmitting and receiving antennas is regarded as a BPF, which has to be custom designed
not to cause the interference. To satisfy this constraints, OFDM
is applied for data transmission in the power transfer system.
Suppose the information symbol on the kth subcarrier is s[k]
(k = 0, ..., N 1), the OFDM symbol is given as

4.5mm

27cm

Transmi!ng antenna

Fig. 3.

Resonant coupling system with two coils

L1 M

Z0

C0

L1 M

Rr

Rr
C1

Fig. 4.

N 1
2nk
1
u[n] =
s[k]ej N ,
N k=0

C0

Z0

C1

Equivalent circuit of the power transfer system

(6)

where n (n = 0, ..., N 1) is time index and N is the number

of subcarriers. The guard interval is added before the data
transmission. The baseband
P 1 signal at the output of the filter
is given by x(t) = n=0 u[n]Ct (t nTs ), where Ct (t) is
the impulse response of the transmitting filter, P is the length
of the impulse response, and Ts is the symbol duration. In

It is assumed that the antenna is only moved toward the z-axis.

The measured inductance of the coil both at the transmitting
and receiving antenna experimentally, L1 and L2 , have the
same values as the calculated values in the circuit model, L1
and L2 .
TABLE II
M EASUREMENT EQUIPMENTS
Equipment
Vector network analyser
VNA control software
Circuit simulator
Tx antenna
Fig. 6.

Experimental single antenna.

Rx Antenna

Specification
Agilent 8753ET
Agilent technology
Intuilink (Version 1.3)
PSpice circuit simulator
Loop antenna
(D=27cm)
Loop antenna
(D=27cm)

IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS

Port 1

Port 2

A"enuator

Transmi!ng
antenna



h6h>G%@

A"enuator

Receiving
antenna





dz
Fig. 7.





Experimental setup.

 b


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([SHULPHQWDObPHDVXUHPHQW









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this system, the antennas are fixed and multipath fading is not
assumed. The received signal is given as
y(t) =

P
1

u[n]h(t nTs ) + v(t),

Transfer function |S21 | (dz = 10cm).

(7)
A. |S21 | Characteristic

n=0

where v(t) is the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), h(t)

is the impulse response of the composite channel and is given
by
h(t) = Ct (t) Cr (t),

Fig. 8.

(8)

where denotes convolution and Cr (t) is the impulse response of the receiving filter. The frequency response of
channel in the communication model, H, is equivalent to |S21 |
in the power transfer system.
III. E XPERIMENTAL M EASUREMENT
The experimental single antenna with 3-turn coil is shown
in Fig. 6 and measurement setup is shown in Fig. 7. The measurement equipment is shown in Table II. In this experimental
system, |S21 | was measured with the vector network analyzer.

Figure 8 shows |S21 | characteristic given as measured experimentally and calculated from the equivalent circuit model.
The distance between the transmitting and receiving antenna
on the experimental measurements, dz, is set to 10[cm], the
coupling coefficient, k, on the circuit simulator is set to 0.176
from Fig. 5. In Fig. 8, both the theoretical curve based on
the circuit model and the experimental measurement curve
show the splitting of resonant peak. As the coupling between
the coils at the transmitting and receiving antenna becomes
stronger, the peak splits into two. Moreover, the theoretical
curve based on the circuit model does not fit the experimental
measurement curve. It is due to the mismatch of derived values
on the experimental measurement model and equivalent circuit
model, which are chosen from parameters such as resistances,
stray capacitances and self inductances.

AWGN

BER measurement

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IDFT

Signal generated



Phase
correc!on

DFT



| S 21 | from the





| S 21 | is adjusted to the

IDFT

circuit model or
the experimental
measurement



DFT

bandwidth of OFDM signals



Fig. 11.



Simulation model.






&GNC[VKOG=6U?

Fig. 9.

Impulse response of |S21 | from the circuit model (dz=10cm).





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Fig. 12.

BER performance of QPSK (dz=10cm).

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Fig. 10. Impulse response of |S21 | from the experimental measurement

(dz=10cm).

B. Impulse Response
To investigate the influence of the transmitting and receiving
antennas, the impulse responses of |S21 | is shown. Figs. 9
and 10 display the impulse response of the channel in the
delay domain between the antennas. In the data transmission
system, OFDM is employed for the 2nd modulation, and the
bandwidth of OFDM is designed to fit the relatively large
impulse response of the channel in the guard interval period.
Thus, the number of the subcarriers is derived to satisfy this
condition:
N/Ts 4W.

(9)

Here, 4W is the bandwidth of the composite filters, which is

measured at half-power points (3dB) from the peak.
C. BER Performance
1) Simulation Model: BER performance is evaluated
through computer simulation. The simulation model is shown
in Fig. 11 and the simulation conditions are shown in Table

III. Information bits are modulated with quadrature phase shift

keying (QPSK) or 64 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM)
on each subcarrier. The number of discrete Fourier transform
(DFT) points is set to 32, which is fit to 4W given from
experimentally measured |S21 | characteristic as shown in Fig.
8. The guard interval is set to 8, which is 1/4 of the number
of subcarrier N . The phase compensation is assumed to be
perfect.
TABLE III
S IMULATION C ONDITIONS
Modulation scheme
Bandwidth
Sampling interval
FFT size
Number of data subcarriers
Number of guard interval
Channel model
Number of OFDM packets
dy
dz

1st : QPSK/64QAM
2nd : OFDM
0.67 [MHz]
1.5 seconds
32
32
8
AWGN
10, 000, 000
0cm
10cm





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This work is supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for the

Global Center of Excellence for high-Level Global Cooperation for Leading-Edge Platform on Access Spaces from the
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science, and Technology in Japan.

R EFERENCES

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Acknowledgments

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Fig. 13.

BER performance of 64QAM (dz=10cm).

2) Simulation Results: Figure 12 and 13 show the BER

performance on the AWGN model with QPSK and 64QAM,
respectively. The bandwidth of OFDM is set to fit the narrow
bandwidth given from experimental measurements as shown
in Fig. 8. In these figures, BER performance is degraded
compared to the AWGN theoretical curve due to the frequency
selective channel, which is caused by the splitting resonant
frequency. Moreover, the BER curve with experimental frequency response is worse than that of the calculated frequency
response from the circuit model. This is because the large
impulse response can be observed in Fig. 10.
V. C ONCLUSIONS
In this paper, data transmission for power transfer system
has been investigated. Resonant coupling is used to deliver
power from one coil to another coil wirelessly. In the wireless power transfer system, information, such as frequency,
required power and element values, need to be transmitted
initially to ensure safe power transfer. The equivalent circuit
of the antenna is BPF, and the transfer function |S21 | is
regarded as the impulse response of the channel in the data
transmission. In this paper, the transfer function |S21 | is given
from calculation on the circuit model and from experimental
measurements.
In the data transmission model, OFDM is used as the 2nd
modulation and the impulse response of |S21 | in the time domain is designed to fit within the guard interval period. As the
distance between antennas was fixed, the channel is assumed
to be AWGN. From simulation results, BER performance is
degraded compared to the AWGN theoretical curve due to the
splitting resonant frequency. However, it is assumed that the
system parameters are transmitted as information in this paper.
Therefore, this research is valid for low data rate transmission
with narrow bandwidth. Further work will consider both data
transmission and power transfer.

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