Design 3D Printed Coils for WPT

The geometric shapes of coils influence the performance of a 3D IPT system. In this paper, we proposed a 3D coil design method based on (3D) printing electronics. Given a 3D transmitter coil, the center position of the receiver coil is estimated as a random seed position in the corresponding 3D surface first. At this position, we use the heatmap method with electromagnetic constraints to iteratively extend the coil until the desired power can be transferred via the coil. For each extension of the coil, i.e. a new turn, the shape of the coil is optimized by calculating the convex hull of the new turn in the 2D projection plane. Using this method, we are able to generate a receiver coil to transmit “just enough” power at a given seed position. Then, by fixing the receiver coil, the 3D shape of the transmitter coil can be optimized as well. This zig-zag optimization process iterates until there are few changes of the position and 3D shapes in the iteration. Experiment results with Ansys Maxwell verified the effectiveness of the proposed 3D coil design method, and highlighted possible future research directions as well.