Design of An UAV-Oriented Wireless Power Transfer System with Energy-Efficient Receiver

This paper is to present an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-oriented wireless power transfer (WPT) system which accommodates with an energy-efficient receiver. Actually, the key is to use a buck converter to greatly reduce the current through the receiving coil and the rectifying diodes. As a result, the total power loss on the receiver is effectively reduced. First, to realize the proposed design, the whole system is modeled to analyze its system-level performance. Then, the loss on the receiver is modeled to instruct the parameter design of the buck converter, namely the duty ratio and switching frequency. After that, an experimental prototype is developed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed system. Results show that the proposed WPT system can achieve a dc-to-load efficiency of 82%, which is 9% higher than the case without the buck. Moreover, when the charging current is 6 A, the total loss on the receiver is reduced up to 14.4 W by properly configuring the buck converter.