Undersea Capacitive Coupled Simultaneous Wireless Power and Data Transfer for Multiload Applications

This article proposes the implementation of a wireless power supply and data transmission system for automatic underwater vehicle (AUV) clusters in submarine multiload application scenarios, which is based on the principle of single capacitive coupling and comprises a power station at the transmitting side and multiple devices at the receiving side. The power station can charge all devices synchronously while also achieving instructions from the power station to multiple AUVs and the data loading of the power station from each AUV. First, the equivalent circuits of undersea capacitive coupled simultaneous wireless power and data transfer (UCC-SWPDT) system are built and the characterization of the power channel and the bi-directional data channel are investigated. Next, the interference of the power channel to the data channel is analyzed. The modeling of the coupling mechanism in seawater is developed and simulated, while a parametric design procedure for the UCC-SWPDT system is proposed. Finally, a prototype with a total output power of 200 W and a data rate up to 1 Mb/s is built, where the experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the UCC-SWPDT system proposed in this article to be applied in submerged multiload scenarios.