Design and study of data and power wireless transfer system for UAV

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been widely used in a variety of occasions in recent decades. Due to the lack of battery capacity, its endurance has been limited. To tackle this problem, wireless power transfer (WPT) technology is a great solution to UAV from the charging perspective. In this paper, a data and power wireless transfer system of UAV based on inductive power transfer (IPT) technology is proposed. The key constraint of wireless charging with regards to the inherent magnetic coupling coefficient is investigated. In this paper, ferrite and metglas amorphous alloy are used as a case study of the magnetic coupling problem. The magnetic material is placed next to the secondary coil side to investigate the effects of horizontal displacement and air gap distance on the coupling coefficient and magnetic field distribution. An experimental system platform is implemented, and the commercial finite element software tool Comsol is used to evaluate the performance of the magnetic material. The simulation results showed that amorphous alloy magnetic material is superior to ferrite material, and it is in a good agreement to the experimental results. Furthermore, the attention of using metglass material in the practical application has been discussed.