Data-Driven Modeling of Wireless Power Transfer Systems With Multiple Transmitters

This article develops a new method of data-driven modeling for a class of multiple-transmitter single-receiver wireless power transfer (WPT) systems. A continuous-time multiple-input single-output (MISO) model with pure time delays is used to characterize the input-output behavior of the system, where the transfer functions associated with each input channel are not constrained to have the same denominator. Moreover, the time delays are allowed to be a fraction of the sampling interval in order to account for the delay effects that stem from circuit components and wireless communication, which are, by nature, often a fraction of the sampling interval. An optimal refined instrumental variable method is proposed to estimate the parameters and time delays of the MISO model based on sampled input-output data. In contrast to the conventional circuit-theory-based modeling methods that rely on circuit parameters and result in models which are often complex, the proposed data-based method yields parsimonious models, whose parameters are directly estimated from input-output data. Due to the easy availability of sampled data in control engineering applications, the proposed method is clearly more user-friendly, having a broad prospect for efficient operation of WPT systems, such as prediction, optimization, and control. Numerical and experimental results are presented to validate the effectiveness and merit of the proposed method.