Evaluation of RF Wireless Power Transfer for Low-Power Aircraft Sensors

TL;DR

This study evaluates the feasibility of using RF wireless power transfer to wirelessly power low-power aircraft sensors, demonstrating potential coverage and efficiency improvements in cabin environments.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed assessment of RF WPT technology for powering in-cabin sensors in aviation, including experimental validation and potential enhancement methods.

Findings

RF WPT can cover an area of 20 seats in a cabin mock-up.

Received signal strength can reach up to 28 mW.

Power transmission rate can be up to 5.5 Hz.

Abstract

Low-power sensors can be integrated into an aircraft for numerous use cases. Conventionally, these sensors are powered via cables, which introduces various disadvantages to the overall efficiency of the aircraft. Alternatively, batteries may be used. However, this implies the necessity of additional maintenance for battery replacement. Another option to remove power cables is to use Radio Frequency (RF) Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) systems. Although general RF WPT technology has been studied in the literature, its feasibility for aviation use cases is not fully investigated. In this paper, we study the feasibility of RF WPT to wirelessly power low-power in-cabin sensors. In a cabin mock-up we show that RF WPT techonology is capable of almost fully covering an area of 20 seats and quantitatively assess this using Received Signal Strength Indicators (up to $28$ mW) and packet interval rate (up to $5.5$ Hz). Furthermore, we perform multi-tone sinusoidal wave experiments for power transmission scheme in a lab environment and thereby present potential ways to improve receiver sensitivity and consequently increase the WPT coverage in the cabin without changing the average transmission power. The overall results show that certain low-power cabin use cases can be supported by already existing commercial RF WPT systems.