Indigenous design and development of underwater wireless power transfer system

Abstract

Maritime systems employ wireless sensor nodes, wireless network systems, autonomous underwater vehicles and underwater surveillance systems for marine safety and surveillance operations. Most of these systems are powered using rechargeable batteries and recharging these batteries is considered as one of the challenges. In this paper, indigenous design and development of a 500W wireless power transfer system (WPTS) for recharging the batteries of autonomous underwater vehicles is reported, which is an outcome of a funded project. The performance of proposed system designed is assessed in air as well as underwater using different types of windings and results are reported for various experiments carried out using the system. The proposed system can be easily adapted for various other underwater systems, nodes and robots too.