Wireless Power Transfer Utilizing a High-$Q$ Self-Resonant Structure

The range and efficiency of a wireless power transfer (WPT) system is limited by the quality factor of the resonant coils. Conventional resonant coils are made from solid or Litz wire. At megahertz frequencies solid wire is not utilized well due to skin effect, and Litz wire is very lossy due to proximity effect. We present a multilayer self-resonant structure as a low-cost method for creating high-Q coils. This structure uses thin foil layers that are separated by a dielectric material in order to form an LC resonator, while also forcing equal current sharing between conductors. The self-resonant structure makes it feasible to achieve advantages similar to Litz wire, but at multi-megahertz frequencies where effective Litz wire is not commercially available. These structures are made with foil layers much thinner than a skin depth, which can make handling these thin layers a challenge. To solve this problem, we also present a modified self-resonant structure in which the layered conductors are made with flex-PCB substrates with no vias. The PCB substrates provide a relatively inexpensive way to handle thin conductive layers, and the modified self-resonant structure ensures that the poor dielectric properties of the PCB substrates do not impact the quality factor of the structure. A prototype of the modified self-resonant structure has a quality factor of 1183 at 7.09 MHz, despite only being 6.6 cm in diameter, which is more than 6.5x larger than other coils presented in the literature with a similar diameter. An experimental WPT setup utilizing two self-resonant structures achieves 94% efficiency at a distance of 5.0 cm, which is more than twice the distance as similarly sized conventional coils can achieve while maintaining the same efficiency.