Power stage design for a surface wireless power transmission system using a coupled electric field

Conventional wireless power transfer methods based on coupled magnetic fields need a complex winding structure on the surface of the energy transfer and shows poor efficiency near metal objects due to the eddy current effect. In this study, to mitigate these problems, we investigate an electric field-coupled power transmission system, which is less prone to metal object problems and EMI. Because of the fundamental physical limit in the size of link capacitances, a half-bridge converter with an impedance matching transformer is proposed and the design procedure is derived to provide a soft-switching scheme. Hardware implementation shows that the proposed scheme with a pair of 10cm by 10cm copper plate can power a 1.4W USB FAN in a separation of 0.2mm by using insulating paper when driven by 227 kHz gate pulse. © ICROS 2014.