Induction Heating for Variably Sized Ferrous and Non-Ferrous Materials through Load Modulation

Induction heating (IH) is a process of heating the electrically conducting materials especially ferromagnetic materials with the help of electromagnetic induction through generating heat in an object by eddy currents. A well-entrenched way of IH is to design a heating system pertaining to the usage of ferromagnetic materials such as stainless steel, iron, etc., which restricts the end user’s choice of using utensils made of ferromagnetic only. This research article proposes a new scheme of induction heating that is equally effective for heating ferromagnetic and non-ferromagnetic materials such as aluminium and copper. This is achieved by having a competent IH system that embodies a series resonant inverter and controller where a competent flexible load modulation (FLM) is deployed. FLM facilitates change in operating frequency in accordance with the type of material chosen for heating. The recent attempts by researchers on all metal IH have not addressed much on the variable shapes and sizes of the material, whereas this research attempts to address that issue as well. The proposed induction heating system is verified for a 2 kW system and is compatible with both industrial and domestic applications.

Frequency analysis of load modulation networks for asymmetric Doherty power amplifiers in GaN

This paper investigates the frequency response of load modulation networks for asymmetric Doherty power amplifiers (ADPA) with an output back-off power level larger than 6 dB and a power ratio of peak to main amplifier (N − 1) larger than 1. The influence of the main path impedance transformer (IT) on the Doherty impedances at main and peak path as well as on the ADPA's efficiency is analyzed. Scaling of the main IT's characteristic impedance via ξ indicates a maximum broadband matching for an input voltage Vin of ξ · Vin,max. By weighting the frequency- and ξ-dependent efficiency curves using a probability density function (PDF), an optimum is obtained for ξ = 1/N. To verify the theory, three ADPAs with different ξ-scaled ITs are designed, measured, and compared. For the design at 3.6 GHz, a gallium nitride (GaN) transistor is used. By means of the intrinsic node matching technique, matching at the current source plane is obtained. In laboratory measurements, the ADPA with ξ = 1/N achieves a power-added efficiency (PAE) of 63% at 42 dBm output power and a PDF-weighted average PAE of 38.8% within 400 MHz bandwidth for 8 dB peak-to-average power ratio. Comparison with similar state-of-the-art ADPAs in GaN technology shows highest PAE and operation power gain GP for center frequencies larger than 3.0 GHz.

Simulation of impact load modulation device based on drill string vibration

The longitudinal vibration of the bottom drill string is violent and the law is complex during the deep well drilling. The vibration of the drill string brings many adverse effects on the drilling pipe fracture and bit trampoling. Generally speaking, the effective way to control the vibration of drill string is to install damping device in bottom hole. The research group proposes a device that uses the longitudinal vibration energy of the deep well drill string to modulate the impact dynamic load, which converts the vibration energy of the downhole drill string that is not conducive to drilling into the mechanical impact energy that improves the rock breaking capacity of the bit. The impact load modulation device can use the drill string to apply the “mechanical WOB” and the differential pressure between the upper and lower piston to produce the “hydraulic WOB”, The simulation results show that the adjustable range of output load is 2 ~ 7T, and the change of each time is about 2T. The modulation law of impact load under the influence of longitudinal vibration of drill string and different parameters is analyzed. Through ground experiment and simulation, the damping performance and speed-up effect of the modulation device are compared and analyzed, and the impact load output characteristics of the device are analyzed, which provides a thinking for the design of damping and pressurization tools.

Phase Detection and Modulation Improvement for Active Load Modulation during Continuous Transmission

The paper covers one of the communication technologies used in wireless sensor networks. We have presented improvements in existing radio frequency identification (RFID) systems to address the problem of the phase selection in active load modulation (ALM). The phase selection affects the interoperability of communication devices and has to be addressed in the design phase of a new tag. A novel transmission method is presented to make the phase selection irrelevant for device interoperability. A second solution is shown to improve the existing system synchronization, which allows operation with arbitrary selected phase. A mathematical analysis of signals present on the antenna was used together with the reference reader model to perform an analysis of proposed improvements. We proved that the proposed transmission method is less affected by phase selection. Furthermore, we demonstrated that existing system improvement allows synchronization and operation at an arbitrarily selected phase despite the continuous transmission and large signal-to-interference ratio.

Ultra-Compact mm-Wave Monolithic IC Doherty Power Amplifier for Mobile Handsets

This work develops a novel dynamic load modulation Power Amplifier (PA) circuity that can provide an optimum compromise between linearity and efficiency while covering multiple cellular frequency bands. Exploiting monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMIC) technology, a fully integrated 1W Doherty PA architecture is proposed based on 0.1 μm AlGaAs/InGaAs Depletion-Mode (D-Mode) technology provided by the WIN Semiconductors foundry. The proposed wideband DPA incorporates the harmonic tuning Class-J mode of operation, which aims to engineer the voltage waveform via second harmonic capacitive load termination. Moreover, the applied post-matching technique not only reduces the impedance transformation ratio of the conventional DPA, but also restores its proper load modulation. The simulation results indicate that the monolithic drive load modulation PA at 4 V operation voltage delivers 44% PAE at the maximum output power of 30 dBm at the 1 dB compression point, and 34% power-added efficiency (PAE) at 6 dB power back-off (PBO). A power gain flatness of around 14 ± 0.5 dB was achieved over the frequency band of 23 GHz to 27 GHz. The compact MMIC load modulation technique developed for the 5G mobile handset occupies the die area of 3.2 mm2.

Extended Bandwidth and Increased Efficiency Quasi-Doherty Power Amplifier Design With A Revised Approach For Load Modulation

This paper presents an approach to power added efficiency (PAE) increase for Quasi-Doherty power amplifier (Q-DPA) design. For this aim, active feedback is utilized instead of a passive quarter wavelength transmission line (TL) usage, which is conventionally used in the DPA schematic. PAE increase can be done by applying an accurate load modulation to the main amplifier (PAmain), especially for technologies in which output impedance of the main power amplifier (Zout,main) considerably varies in both low and high power regions. Because such precise modulation is still based on a modified TL, this approach suffers from the inherent narrowband behavior of that TL. As a consequence, expecting a wideband DPA may not be satisfied in all cases. To deal with this issue, active feedback is used to play a role in reaching PAmain, which is not saturated before, to its maximum efficiency at the highest level of received input power (Pin) in the high power region. Following Zout,main trajectories in power and frequency sweeps simultaneously just by a passive TL are not needed anymore. Still, for the sake of preventing total PAE degradation due to the consummated power by the feedback path’s power amplifier (PAfeedback) should be limited, analytical confinement is provided in this work. A comparison is made between GaAs pHEMT 0.25um MMIC technology-based conventional DPA and the proposed revised approach based-DPA to verify the mentioned approach. The proposed PA shows maximum output power of 33.4 dBm, maximum PAE of 41.6, fractional bandwidth of 11%. The Q-DPA works with a maximum power gain of 24.16.