Wireless power transfer technology via magnetic resonance coupling now has significant interest in industry and research with many applications. This paper proposes a linear multiple transmitter coil array (5 coils) for wireless power transfer for added gain and hence higher transfer efficiency in comparison to a single transmitter coil. The frequency splitting effect as a result of the coupling between the resonant transmitter coils due to their close proximity is shown to reduce the transfer efficiency to a receiver. The effect of the array spacing on splitting effect suppression is verified. It is shown that the splitting effect is sup-pressed as the distance between the coils is increased leading to a higher received signal and hence higher efficiency. Proposed horizontal displacement of the middle transmitter coils (2nd and 4th coils) in the coil array is shown to suppress frequency splitting. To further suppress the splitting effect due to the magnetic coupling between the transmitter coils, a multiple transmitter array is proposed with different coil turns. Thus it is shown that designing the multiple coil array with mixed number of coil turns (the 2nd and 4th coils are designed to have different number of turns as compared to the other three coils) causes uniform coupling among the coils reducing and eventually eliminating the splitting effect. Also to increase the efficiency at the receiver coil, displaced stacked coils are introduced on top of the coil array. The pro-posed stacked coil array is demonstrated to improve the transfer efficiency. Using the techniques, the proposed linear array structure achieves a transfer efficiency of 36.9% for a receiver coil at the boresight of the array at a transfer distance of 40 cm.
Energy Efficiency Analysis through Misalignment on New Design of Hexagonal Coil Array in Wireless Power Transfer
