A Cascaded Boost-Buck Converter for High-Efficiency Wireless Power Transfer Systems

Wireless power transfer (WPT) has attracted an ever increasing interest from both industry and academics over the past few years. Its applications vary from small power devices such as mobile phones and tablets to high power electric vehicles, and from small transfer distance of centimeters to large distance of tens of centimeters. In order to achieve a high efficiency WPT system, each circuit should function at a high efficiency along with proper impedance matching techniques to minimize the power reflection due to impedance mismatch. This paper proposes an analysis on the system efficiency to determine the optimal impedance requirement for coils, rectifier and DC-DC converter. A novel cascaded boost-buck DC-DC converter is designed to provide the optimal impedance matching in WPT system for various loads including resistive load, ultracapacitors and batteries. The proposed 13.56 MHz WPT system can achieve a total system efficiency over 70% in experiment.