Design and Optimization of Coupling Coils for Bidirectional Wireless Charging System of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

To solve the battery power supply problem with wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a novel bidirectional wireless charging system is proposed, in which an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can fly to the WSNs to charge sensors through high-frequency wireless power transfer (WPT) and also obtain energy for its own battery in the same way. To improve the performance of the UAV bidirectional wireless charging system, a lightweight design is adopted to increase its loading capacity and working time. Moreover, the radii and the numbers of turns and pitches of coupling coils were designed and optimized on the basis of simulations and experiments. Experimental results show that the weight of optimized UAV coil was reduced by 34.45%. The power transfer efficiency (PTE) of the UAV coil to sensor coil increased from 60.2% to 74.4% at a transmission distance of 15 cm, while that of the ground transmitting coil to UAV coil increased from 65.2% to 90.1% at 10 cm.