Investigation and Design of Multi-Transmitter Coil Inductive Power Transfer System to Increase Misalignment Tolerance

The efficiency of an inductive power transfer (IPT) system is greatly affected by lateral misalignment between the transmitter and receiver coils. This study proposes a hexagonal arrangement of multi-coil configuration IPT system to improve misalignment tolerance while maintaining the transfer efficiency. Key parameters including equivalent self and mutual inductance of various coil connections are examined. The magnetic characteristics including flux distribution and density, and mutual inductance are simulated using COMSOL Multiphysics software package. Experimental results of the proposed multi-coil IPT system are given and compared with the conventional two-coil IPT system. Simulation and experimental results have shown that the proposed multi-transmitter coil configuration can increase misalignment tolerance compared with conventional system.