Design and Analysis of a Flexible Multi-Output Wireless Power Transfer System with Variable Inductor

Multi-output wireless power transfer (WPT) system for a variety of loads has great potential to be used in practical applications, such as wireless office table, magnetic resonant imaging device and logistic sorting robots. The Multioutput WPT can power multiple receivers simultaneously. This paper presents the design and analysis of a flexible multioutput WPT system with variable inductor. Without compensation capacitor in the receiver side, only a receiver coil is connected that not only contributes to receiver side integration, but also makes the loads more flexible. By introducing a variable inductor (VI) in the transmitter side, each load can be controlled independently from any other loads, which makes it possible to power the multiple loads from the same inverter output. The proposed Multi-output WPT system presents the advantages of inherent zero-voltage switching (ZVS) for the inverter, fixed operation frequency and efficiency optimization. A prototype with multiple loads is built, and the experimental results have confirmed the validity of the proposed Multi-output WPT system.