Safe Power Delivery Using a Reconfigurable Mesh of Inductive Transceivers

Existing wireless power transfer (WPT) systems remove the inconvenience of charging portable devices, such as mobile phones, through cables, and can also help solve the problem of getting power into "hard to reach places", such as powering or recharging medical implants. However, the vast majority of existing WPT solutions are limited by being unidirectional, point-to-point systems, i.e. there is one dedicated power source, and one dedicated receiver that collects the transmitted energy. In this work, we will develop a new generation of wireless power transfer technology where we will create networks of active wireless power transceivers, allowing power to be routed, safety, around the network, over long distances and with high efficiency. The technologies that will be created in this work will enable wireless power systems to be deployed in vastly more application scenarios due to the significant increase in capability that will be created. For example:

1. The move from systems with active transmitters and passive receivers to an active-active, transceiver-transceiver approach will concurrently enable power to be moved in either direction across the magnetic link ("bidirectional wireless power transfer", as well as enabling operation of the system with lower coupling factors (due to the tuning flexibility that the active-active approach creates). Operation with lower coupling factors inherently means greater transmission distance between the power source and the receiver.

2. The creation of a network of wireless power transceivers (rather than point-to-point links), where any number of transmitters can freely join and leave the network, opens up many other new applications that would otherwise not be practical, or in some cases be possible. It will allow devices to participate, in an ad-hoc way in receiving and transmitting power into the network (as portable devices are moved around), and helping relay power from a source to a node over a number of hops,...