Compensation Optimization of the Relay Coil in a Strong Coupled Coaxial Three-Coil Wireless Power Transfer System

With regards to wireless power transfer (WPT) systems with relay coils, the power transfer distance, efficiency, and capacity can be effectively improved by tuning the relative position of the relay coil compared with a common two-coil WPT system. However, the cross-coupling between nonadjacent coils can cause the system to no longer resonate even when the compensation capacitors resonant with the corresponding coils. This will cause an increase in reactive power and additional losses in the coils. In this article, the optimal operating conditions of the coaxial fully resonant three-coil WPT system are analyzed first for achieving higher efficiency compared with the two-coil WPT system with the same load and the same power transfer distance, by adjusting the relative location of the source coil and relay coil. An optimization design method for further improving the efficiency of the three-coil WPT system by tuning the compensation capacitor of the relay coil is proposed subsequently. The experimental results show that for a given load (10 Ω in this article), the efficiency of the three-coil WPT system can be improved from 88.8% to 92.3% compared with the two-coil WPT system, and be further improved to 93.3% when the relay compensation capacitor is optimized.