Typical wireless power transfer (WPT) systems on the market charge only a single receiver at a time. However, it can be expected that the need will arise to charge multiple devices at once by a single transmitter. Unfortunately, adding extra receivers influences the system efficiency. By impedance matching, the loads of the system can be adjusted to maximize the efficiency, regardless of the number of receivers. In this work, we present the analytical solution for achieving maximum system efficiency with any number of receivers for capacitive WPT. Among others, we determine the optimal loads and the maximum system efficiency. We express the efficiency as a function of a single variable, the system kQ-product and demonstrate that load capacitors can be inserted to compensate for any cross-coupling between the receivers.

Wireless power transfer (WPT) has attracted attention from academia and industry in recent years. WPT has natural electrical isolation between primary and secondary side, which ensures safe charging in an underwater environment. This breakthrough technology greatly facilitates the deep-sea power transmission. However, at the current stage the transferred power and energy efficiency level are not up to that of the WPT system in the air. The major concerns include the attenuation is seawater, extreme temperature and pressure conditions, disturbance of ocean currents, and bio-security. Three questions are answered in this paper: first, the expressions of eddy current loss and attenuation of electromagnetic wave in seawater are unified, and the influence of seawater as transmission medium on the WPT system is discussed. Second, the evolution of electromagnetic coupling structure suitable for underwater applications is studied. Third, the loss and heating effects of an underwater WPT system and the corresponding bio-fouling phenomenon are investigated. The questions above were addressed through analysis of electrical properties, coupler structures, and bio-fouling effects of the underwater WPT system. This paper will facilitate the study and research on underwater WPT applications.

This paper presents an effective and time saving procedure for designing a three-coil resonant inductive wireless power transfer (WPT) link. The proposed approach aims at optimizing the power transfer efficiency of the link for given constraints imposed by the specific application of interest. The WPT link is described as a two-port network with equivalent lumped elements analytically expressed as function of the geometrical parameters. This allows obtaining a closed-form expression of the efficiency that can be maximized by acting on the geometrical parameters of the link by using a general purpose optimization algorithm. The proposed design procedure allows rapidly finding the desired optimal solution while minimizing the computational efforts. Referring to the case of an application constraining the dimensions of the receiver, analytical data are validated through full-wave simulations and measurements.