UAV Fleet Charging on Telecom Towers With Differential Capacitive Wireless Power Transfer

This article introduces a capacitive differential wireless power transfer architecture to efficiently charge an array of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on a telecom tower as a UAV airport. A switched-capacitor-based ladder differential power processing (DPP) converter is utilized to regulate the voltages of multiple series-stacked wireless charging modules from a high-voltage dc bus. The half-bridge switches in the DPP circuit are reused as an inverter in a capacitive power transfer (CPT) system with a double-sided LC-compensation network, featuring reduced semiconductor component count and device stress. The capacitive coupling plates are integrated into landing platforms and UAV landing gears for high coupling capacitance and minimum influence on aerodynamics. An experimental prototype and related design considerations are presented to achieve high efficiency and ensure robust performance against misalignments. The DWPT architecture is verified through an eight-port DPP converter supporting up to eight CPT charging modules.