A Novel Hill Climbing-Golden Section Search Maximum Energy Efficiency Tracking Method for Wireless Power Transfer Systems in Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

Efficiency has always been one of the most critical indicators for evaluating wireless power transfer (WPT) systems. To achieve fast maximum energy efficiency tracking (MEET), this paper provides an innovative control method utilizing the hill climbing-golden section search (HC-GSS) method of an LCC-S compensated WPT system. The receiver side includes a buck-boost converter that regulates the output current or voltage to meet output requirements. In the meantime, the buck-boost converter on the transmitter side is managed by the HC-GSS approach for MEET by minimizing the input power under the premise of output stability. Compared with the conventional P&O method, the HC-GSS method can eliminate the trade-off between the oscillation and convergence rate because it is designed for different system stages. In this WPT system, there is no need for direct communication between the transmitter and receiver. Therefore, the system is potentially cheaper to implement and does not suffer from annoying communication delays, which are prevalent in underwater environments for unmanned underwater vehicles’ (UUV) WPT systems. Both the simulation and experiment results show that this method can improve the efficiency of the WPT system without communication. The proposed method remains valid with coupler displacement as it does not include the mutual inductance of the system.