A three-dimensional discontinuous galerkin time-domain finite element method for electromagnetic modeling of wireless power transfer coils

Inductive coupling based wireless power transfer (WPT) is a popular short-range power delivery mechanism for many industrial, biomedical, and home electronic appliances applications. A numerical methodology is needed for the analysis of the electromagnetic propagation, radiation, scattering and coupling of highly efficient WPT systems. This study is based on the discontinuous Galerkin time-domain (DGTD) finite element method. A brief survey of the DGTD method is given, which is a finite element method using discontinuous piecewise polynomials as basis functions and numerical fluxes based on up-winding for stability. DGTD method is characterized by the fact that no continuity is enforced between the elements, then it is easy to parallelize and results in fast solvers. Even though the finite element method is used by a few researchers to study WPT problems, we found no study using the DGTD method to study WPT problems, which is surprising given that this discretization technique seems particularly well suited for these problems. A design of two coils at the frequency of 3 MHz is introduced, and the effects of the distance and misalignment between two coils on the mutual coupling are studied. The numerical results are validated by experimental and analytical results.

Uncontrolled Keywords

Coils, computational modeling, discontinuous Galerkin method, electromagnetic propagation, finite element analysis, mathematical model, Maxwell equations, mutual inductance, numerical analysis, time-domain analysis, wireless power transfer