Suppressing Leakage Magnetic Field in Wireless Power Transfer using Halbach Array-Based Resonators

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Halbach array-inspired coil design for wireless power transfer that significantly reduces leakage magnetic fields while maintaining high power efficiency, enabling safer and higher power transfer capabilities.

Contribution

A novel ferrite-less coil design using a Halbach array-inspired winding strategy to suppress leakage magnetic fields in wireless power transfer systems.

Findings

Achieves 86.6% reduction in magnetic field intensity at 75 mm distance.

Maintains 96.0% power transfer efficiency.

Enables over 50 times more power transfer without increased magnetic exposure.

Abstract

Wireless power transfer has the potential to seamlessly power electronic systems, such as electric vehicles, industrial robots, and mobile devices. However, the leakage magnetic field is a critical bottleneck that limits the transferable power level, and heavy ferromagnetic shields are needed for transferring large amounts of power. In this paper, we propose a ferrite-less coil design that generates an asymmetric magnetic field pattern focused on one side of the resonator, which effectively reduces the leakage magnetic field. The key to enabling the asymmetric field pattern is a coil winding strategy inspired by the Halbach array, a permanent magnet arrangement, which is then tailored for wireless power using an evolutionary strategy algorithm. Numerical analyses and simulations demonstrated that the proposed coil structure delivers the same amount of power as spiral coils, while achieving an 86.6% reduction in magnetic field intensity at a plane located 75 mm away from the resonator pair and a power efficiency of 96.0%. We verified our approach by measuring the power efficiency and magnetic field intensity of a test wireless power system operating at 6.78 MHz. These findings indicate that our approach can efficiently deliver over 50 times more power without increasing magnetic field exposure, making it a promising solution for high-power wireless power transfer applications.