Design of an Inductive Power Transfer System with Flexible Coils for Body-worn Applications

This paper describes an IPT (Inductive Power Transfer) system for body worn electronics, and investigates the challenges for an IPT system that arise specifically in this scenario. Principally, these are: highly variable coil coupling through time-varying miss-alignment and coil separation; a requirement that one or both of the coils must be wearable and thus flexible; and proximity to the human body introducing limits on the maximum EM field. The highly variable coupling results in a system that must operate effectively with a large range of received powers, whilst the constraints on the realisation of the coils typically reduce the Q-factor; the human exposure considerations limit both the maximum field strengths that the wearer of a receiver coil might experience, and also the field strengths that a 3rd party might be exposed to, for instance when approaching the transmit coil.