Wireless Charger Design of Robot Vacuum Cleaners with Power Repeaters for High Compatibility

Curved coils constructed by flexible printed circuit board (PCB) or hand-wound Litz-wire have been steadily becoming popular due to its applicable potential on devices that have a curved body. Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) systems based on curved coils and flexible ferrite sheets may provide more flexible charging solutions for various electronic devices such as rice cookers and robot vacuum cleaners. Power repeaters are also used in IPT systems to extend wireless charging range by guiding magnetic fields to the receiving coil. The interaction of these three topics could be inspiring. In this paper, two adjustable power repeaters are applied to an IPT charging system with various curved receiving coils designed for vacuum cleaners. Two power repeaters share the identical structure as the Tx coil and could be rotated to mirror symmetrically. The input and output power are calculated by analyzing the equivalent circuit model. The self-inductance, mutual inductance, and coupling coefficient of the proposed system are obtained via finite element method simulation with variable rotating angles. Three typical IPT designs have also been simulated in ANSYS Maxwell and compared with the proposed magnetic design. The comparison indicates the enhancing feature of the passive power repeaters on coupling performance and the ability to guide the magnetic flux for better magnetic field coupling. Furthermore, two types of co-simulations defined by the power source via Simplorer are conducted to explore how much power could be transferred. The tuned system is shown to be able to provide about 32 W under 100 kHz operating frequency for charging the battery of a robot vacuum cleaner. The results from theoretical calculation and simulation align well with each other.