Passive Peak Voltage Sensor for Multiple Sending Coils Inductive Power Transmission System

Multi-coil inductive power transmission systems become more and more important in industrial, medical and smart home applications. They are very useful to realize power transmission in case of receivers having some lateral misalignment or even a variable position. In order to reduce losses of energy, a receiver detection and a powering strategy of the sending coils under it is highly required. In this paper, a position detection method is proposed, which is based on the measurement of the voltage amplitude of the sending coils. To investigate the reliability of the novel detector, the measured voltage amplitude in presence of the receiving coil is compared to the voltage amplitude in presence of different metallic materials. The measurements have been carried out under co-concentric and misaligned receiver positions. Experimental results prove the efficiency of the proposed method to detect the receiver coil with various positions and sizes. It differentiates with a high reliability between a receiver coil and a conductive target material.