Impedance Matching to Maximize Induced Current in Repeater of Resonant Inductive Coupling Wireless Power Transfer Systems

Intermediate resonators (repeaters) of resonant inductive coupling wireless power transfer systems can improve the transmission distance as well as the output power. However, frequency bandwidths in which the repeater can operate effectively are very narrow because the repeater usually has a high quality-factor. Furthermore, these frequency bandwidths shift for the following two factors. The first factor is the intensity of the magnetic coupling between the repeater and the other resonator. The second factor is the variation in the natural resonance frequency of the resonators due to a production error, temperature characteristic, and aging degradation. Therefore, the repeater is not practical because the repeater requires accurate adjusting of the circuit parameters every time according to the various conditions. To address this problem, we propose an impedance matching method for the repeater. The proposed method can maximize the induced current in the repeater in wide frequency bandwidth regardless of the variations in the intensity of the magnetic coupling and the natural resonance frequency. Therefore, the proposed method can realize the repeater which can stably improve the performance of the wireless power transfer. Experiment and simulation successfully verified the effectiveness of the proposed method as well as the appropriateness of the theoretical analysis.