Power transfer efficiency in an air-breathing radio frequency ion thruster

Due to a series of challenges such as low-orbit maintenance of satellites, the air-breathing electric propulsion has got widespread attention. Commonly, the radio frequency ion thruster is favored by low-orbit missions due to its high specific impulse and efficiency. In this paper, the power transfer efficiency of the radio frequency ion thruster with different gas compositions is studied experimentally, which is obtained by measuring the radio frequency power and current of the antenna coil with and without discharge operation. The results show that increasing the turns of antenna coils can effectively improve the radio frequency power transfer efficiency, which is due to the improvement of Q factor. In pure N_2 discharge,with the increase of radio frequency power, the radio frequency power transfer efficiency first rises rapidly and then exhibits a less steep increasing trend. The radio frequency power transfer efficiency increases with the increase of gas pressure at relatively high power, while declines rapidly at relatively low power. In N_(2)/O_(2) discharge, increasing the N_(2) content at high power can improve the radio frequency power transfer efficiency, but the opposite was observed at low power. In order to give a better understanding of these trends, an analytic solution in limit cases is utilized, and a Langmuir probe was employed to measure the electron density. It is found that the evolution of radio frequency power transfer efficiency can be well explained by the variation of plasma resistance, which is related to the electron density and the effective electron collision frequency.

Wireless Information and Power Transfer in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Wireless information and power transfer(WIPT) enables simultaneously communications and sustainable power supplement without the erection of power supply lines and the replacement operation of the batteries for the terminals. The application of WIPT to the underwater acoustic sensor networks(UWASNs) not only retains the long range communication capabilities, but also provides an auxiliary and convenient energy supplement way for the terminal sensors, and thus is a promising scheme to solve the energy-limited problem for the UWASNs. In this paper, we propose the integration of WIPT into the UWASNs and provide an overview on various enabling techniques for the WIPT based UWASNs(WIPT-UWASNs) as well as pointing out future research challenges and opportunities for WIPT-UWASNs.

Efficient and stable wireless power transfer based on the non-Hermitian physics

As one of the most attractive non-radiative power transfer mechanisms without cables,efficient magnetic resonance wireless power transfer(WPT)in the near field has been extensively developed in recent years,and promoted a variety of practical applications,such as mobile phones,medical implant devices and electric vehicles.However,the physical mechanism behind some key limitations of the resonance WPT,such as frequency splitting and size-dependent efficiency,is not very clear under the widely used circuit model.Here,we review the recently developed efficient and stable resonance WPT based on non-Hermitian physics,which starts from a completely different avenue(utilizing loss and gain)to introduce novel functionalities to the resonance WPT.From the perspective of non-Hermitian photonics,the coherent and incoherent effects compete and coexist in the WPT system,and the weak stable of energy transfer mainly comes from the broken phase associated with the phase transition of parity-time symmetry.Based on this basic physical framework,some optimization schemes are proposed,including using nonlinear effect,using bound states in the continuum,or resorting to the system with high-order parity-time symmetry.Moreover,the combination of non-Hermitian physics and topological photonics in multi-coil system also provides a versatile platform for long-range robust WPT with topological protection.Therefore,the non-Hermitian physics can not only exactly predict the main results of current WPT systems,but also provide new ways to solve the difficulties of previous designs.

Analysis and Design of Four-Plate Capacitive Wireless Power Transfer System for Undersea Applications

This paper presents a four-plate undersea capacitive wireless power transfer(CPT)system for underwater applications such as autonomous underwater vehicles(AUVs).Generally,a CPT system transfers the power based on electric fields.The complex resonant compensation networks are used to make the CPT system work in the resonant condition.The resonant voltage is always very high.It will be a big challenge to the human safety.In this paper,a virtual electrons periodic reciprocating flow theory is proposed for the CPT system.In one switching cycle,the electrons firstly flow in the forward direction through the forward path and then flow in the inverse direction through the inverse path.The CPT system has been deeply studied with the vacuum dielectric or the air dielectric.However,for the CPT system,there are few papers to show the underwater application.In this paper,an undersea four-plate CPT system is designed and studied in the underwater condition.The two coupling capacitors and other elements of the CPT system could build a closed-loop path.A small value inductor is adapted as a resonant compensation network for the four-plate CPT system.The DC voltage is inverted to the AC voltage in the primary side with the single-phase full-bridge inverter.The resonant voltage is rectified to the DC voltage in the secondary side with the single-phase full-bridge diode rectifier.A 100 W power level CPT system is constructed to verify the theory analysis and the calculation.The theory analysis is verified by the simulated and experimental results.The stable output voltage and load power are achieved in this paper.

RIS-Aided Constant-Envelope Beamforming for Multiuser Wireless Power Transfer:A Max-Min Approach

As a revolutionary hardware technology that can reconfigure the propagation environment,reconfigurable intelligent surfaces(RISs)have been regarded as a promising solution to enhance wireless networks.In this paper,we consider a multiuser multiple-input single-output(MISO)wireless power transfer(WPT)system,which is assisted by several RISs.In order to improve energy efficiency and reduce hardware cost,we consider that the energy transmitter(ET)in the WPT system is equipped with a constant-envelope analog beamformer,instead of a digital beamformer.Focusing on user fairness,we study a minimum received power maximization problem by jointly optimizing the ET beamforming and the RIS phase shifts,subject to the constant-envelope constraints.We iteratively solve this non-convex maxmin problem by leveraging both the successive convex approximation(SCA)method and the alternating direction method of multipliers(ADMM)algorithm.Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and show attractive performance gain brought by RISs.

Wireless communication and wireless power transfer system for implantable medical device

Traditional magnetically coupled resonant wireless power transfer technology uses fixed distances between coils for research,to prevent fluctuations in the receiving voltage,and lead to reduce transmission efficiency.This paper proposes a closed-loop control wireless communication wireless power transfer system with a wearable four-coil structure to stabilize the receiving voltage fluctuation caused by changes in the displacement between the coils.Test results show that the system can provide stable receiving voltage,no matter how the distance between the transmitting coil and the receiving coil is changed.When the transmission distance is 20 mm,the power transfer efficiency of the system can reach 18.5%under the open-loop state,and the stimulus parameters such as the stimulation period and pulse width can be adjusted in real time through the personal computer terminal.

Online Computation Offloading and Trajectory Scheduling for UAV-Enabled Wireless Powered Mobile Edge Computing

The unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)-enabled mobile edge computing(MEC) architecture is expected to be a powerful technique to facilitate 5 G and beyond ubiquitous wireless connectivity and diverse vertical applications and services, anytime and anywhere. Wireless power transfer(WPT) is another promising technology to prolong the operation time of low-power wireless devices in the era of Internet of Things(IoT). However, the integration of WPT and UAV-enabled MEC systems is far from being well studied, especially in dynamic environments. In order to tackle this issue, this paper aims to investigate the stochastic computation offloading and trajectory scheduling for the UAV-enabled wireless powered MEC system. A UAV offers both RF wireless power transmission and computation services for IoT devices. Considering the stochastic task arrivals and random channel conditions, a long-term average energyefficiency(EE) minimization problem is formulated.Due to non-convexity and the time domain coupling of the variables in the formulated problem, a lowcomplexity online computation offloading and trajectory scheduling algorithm(OCOTSA) is proposed by exploiting Lyapunov optimization. Simulation results verify that there exists a balance between EE and the service delay, and demonstrate that the system EE performance obtained by the proposed scheme outperforms other benchmark schemes.

Power Splitting Based SWIPT in Network-Coded Two-Way Networks with Data Rate Fairness:An Information-Theoretic Perspective

This paper investigates the simultaneous wireless information and powertransfer(SWIPT) for network-coded two-way relay network from an information-theoretic perspective, where two sources exchange information via an SWIPT-aware energy harvesting(EH) relay. We present a power splitting(PS)-based two-way relaying(PS-TWR) protocol by employing the PS receiver architecture. To explore the system sum rate limit with data rate fairness, an optimization problem under total power constraint is formulated. Then, some explicit solutions are derived for the problem. Numerical results show that due to the path loss effect on energy transfer, with the same total available power, PS-TWR losses some system performance compared with traditional non-EH two-way relaying, where at relatively low and relatively high signalto-noise ratio(SNR), the performance loss is relatively small. Another observation is that, in relatively high SNR regime, PS-TWR outperforms time switching-based two-way relaying(TS-TWR) while in relatively low SNR regime TS-TWR outperforms PS-TWR. It is also shown that with individual available power at the two sources, PS-TWR outperforms TS-TWR in both relatively low and high SNR regimes.

Middle range wireless power transfer systems with multiple resonators

The equivalent two-port network model of a middle range wireless power transfer(WPT) system was presented based on strongly coupled multiple resonators. The key parameters of the WPT system include self-inductance, resistance, parasitic capacitance, mutual inductance and S-parameters of coils & resonators were analyzed. The impedance matching method was used to optimize load power and transmission efficiency of the multi-resonator WPT system, and the impedance matching method was realized through adjusting the distances between the coils and resonators. Experiments show that the impedance matching method can effectively improve load power and transmission efficiency for middle range wireless power transfer systems with multiple resonators, at distances up to 3 times the coil radius with efficiency more than 70% and load power also close to 3.5 W.

Spectrum Efficiency Maximization for Cooperative Power Beacon-Enabled Wireless Powered Communication Networks

We consider a spectrum efficiency(SE)maximization problem for cooperative power beacon-enabled wireless powered communication networks(CPB-WPCNs),where each transmitter harvests en-ergy from multi-antenna power beacons(PBs)and transmits data to the corresponding receiver.For data transmission,both orthogonal transmission,i.e.,the time splitting(TS)mode,and non-orthogonal trans-mission,i.e.,the interference channel(IC)mode,are considered.Aiming to improve the system SE,the energy beamformers of PBs,the transmit power,and the transmit time duration of transmitters are jointly optimized.For the TS mode,the original non-convex problem is transformed into a convex opti-mization problem by means of variable substitution and semidefinite relaxation(SDR).The rank-one na-ture of this SDR is proved,and then a Lagrange-dual based fast algorithm is proposed to obtain the opti-mal solution with much lower complexity.For the IC mode,to conquer the strong non-convexity of the problem,a branch-reduce-and-bound(BRB)mono-tonic optimization algorithm is designed as a bench-mark.Furthermore,a low-complexity distributed suc-cessive convex approximation(SCA)algorithm is pre-sented.Finally,simulation results validate the perfor-mance of the proposed algorithms,achieving optimal-ity within only 1%∼2%computation time compared to the CVX solver in the TS mode and achieving 98%of the optimal performance in the IC mode.

NOMA Empowered Energy Efficient Data Collection and Wireless Power Transfer in Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks

As the sixth generation network(6G)emerges,the Internet of remote things(IoRT)has become a critical issue.However,conventional terrestrial networks cannot meet the delay-sensitive data collection needs of IoRT networks,and the Space-Air-Ground integrated network(SAGIN)holds promise.We propose a novel setup that integrates non-orthogonal multiple access(NOMA)and wireless power transfer(WPT)to collect latency-sensitive data from IoRT networks.To extend the lifetime of devices,we aim to minimize the maximum energy consumption among all IoRT devices.Due to the coupling between variables,the resulting problem is non-convex.We first decouple the variables and split the original problem into four subproblems.Then,we propose an iterative algorithm to solve the corresponding subproblems based on successive convex approximation(SCA)techniques and slack variables.Finally,simulation results show that the NOMA strategy has a tremendous advantage over the OMA scheme in terms of network lifetime and energy efficiency,providing valuable insights.

Computation Rate Maximization in Multi-User Cooperation-Assisted Wireless-Powered Mobile Edge Computing with OFDMA

In the era of Internet of Things(Io T),mobile edge computing(MEC)and wireless power transfer(WPT)provide a prominent solution for computation-intensive applications to enhance computation capability and achieve sustainable energy supply.A wireless-powered mobile edge computing(WPMEC)system consisting of a hybrid access point(HAP)combined with MEC servers and many users is considered in this paper.In particular,a novel multiuser cooperation scheme based on orthogonal frequency division multiple access(OFDMA)is provided to improve the computation performance,where users can split the computation tasks into various parts for local computing,offloading to corresponding helper,and HAP for remote execution respectively with the aid of helper.Specifically,we aim at maximizing the weighted sum computation rate(WSCR)by optimizing time assignment,computation-task allocation,and transmission power at the same time while keeping energy neutrality in mind.We transform the original non-convex optimization problem to a convex optimization problem and then obtain a semi-closed form expression of the optimal solution by considering the convex optimization techniques.Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed multi-user cooperationassisted WPMEC scheme greatly improves the WSCR of all users than the existing schemes.In addition,OFDMA protocol increases the fairness and decreases delay among the users when compared to TDMA protocol.

Numerical Analysis of Magnetic-Shielding Effectiveness for Magnetic Resonant Wireless Power Transfer System

Magnetic radiation phenomena appear inevitably in the magnetic-resonance wireless power transfer （MR-WPT） system, and regarding this problem the magnetic-shielding scheme is applied to improve the electromagnetic performance in engineering. In this study, the shielding effectiveness of a two-coil MR-WPT system for different material shields is analyzed in theory using Moser＇s formula and Schelkunoff＇s formula. On this basis a candidate magnetic-shielding scheme with a double-layer structure is determined, which has better shielding effectiveness and coils coupling coefficient. Finally, some finite element simulation results validate the correctness of the theoretical analysis, and the shielding effectiveness with the double-layer shield in maximum is 30？dB larger than the one with the single-layer case.

Design of Wireless Power Transfer with High Efficiency for Biomedical Implants

Wireless power transfer(WPT)technology is a popular choice for biomedical implant devices.The demands of higher efficiency and smaller implantation size are hard to compromise in previous studies.In the present work,an implantable magnetic coupling resonant WPT system in-tegrated with a metasurface element working at 430 MHz is presented.Similar planar copper coil components for the transmitting and receiving structures are used to construct the primary system,and then the metasurface element is integrated to constitute the whole WPT system.The effects of the distances between the transmitting coil and skin surface,between the skin surface,and receiv-ing coil are discussed.The results show that the efficiency will be enhanced by 38-50 dB integrat-ing with the metasurface.

Traction power substation balance and losses estimation in AC railways using a power transfer device through Monte Carlo analysis

The high dynamic power requirements present in modern railway transportation systems raise research challenges for an optimal operation of railway electrification. This paper presents a Monte Carlo analysis on the application of a power transfer device installed in the neutral zone and exchanging active power between two sections. The main analyzed parameters are the active power balance in the two neighbor traction power substations and the system power losses. A simulation framework is presented to comprise the desired analysis and a universe of randomly distributed scenarios are tested to evaluate the effectiveness of the power transfer device system. The results show that the density of trains and the relative branch length of a traction power substation should be considered in the evaluation phase of the best place to install a power transfer device, towards the reduction of the operational power losses, while maintaining the two substations balanced in terms of active power.

High-Power Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer: Injection-Locked Magnetron Technology

Applications using simultaneous wireless information and power transfer(SWIPT)have increased significantly.Wireless communication technologies can be combined with the Internet of Things to develop many innovative applications using SWIPT,which is mainly based on wireless energy harvesting from electromagnetic waves used in communications.Wireless power transfer that uses magnetrons has been developed for communication technologies.Injection-locked magnetrons that can be used to facilitate high-power SWIPT for several devices are reviewed in this paper.This new technology is expected to pave the way for promoting the application of SWIPT in a wide range of fields.

Advances in Inductively Coupled Power Transfer Technology for Rail Transit

Traditional power supply method for moving electric railway vehicles is based on contact type power collection technology.This sometimes cannot meet the requirements of modern rail transportation.A new wireless power transfer(WPT)technology can offer significant benefits in modern rail transportation particularly in some stringent environments.This paper reviews the status and the development of rail transit power supply technology,and introduces a new challenging technology--inductive power transfer(IPT)technology for rail transit.Tesla established the underpinning of IPT technology and creatively and significantly demonstrated power transfer by using highly resonant tuned coils long time ago.However,only in recent years the IPT technology has been significantly improved including the transfer air-gap length,transfer efficiency,coupling factor,power transfer capability and so on.This is mainly due to innovative semiconductor switches,higher control frequency,better coil designs and high performance material,new track and vehicle construction techniques.Recent advances in IPT for rail transit and major milestones of the developments are summarized in this paper.Some important technical issues such as coupling coil structures,power supply schemes,segmentation switching techniques for long-distance power supply,and bidirectional IPT systems for braking energy feedback are discussed.

Decode-and-Forward Relay Based Bidirectional Wireless Information and Power Transfer

In this paper, we propose the decode-and-forward(DF) based bidirectional wireless information and power transfer(BWIPT) in two-hop relay systems, where the bidirectional relay can decode and forward information from the user to the access point(AP), and assist the wireless power transfer from the AP to the user. To maximize the information rate from the user to the AP, we derive the closed form expression of the optimal power splitting(PS) factor, and the time allocation scheme to obtain the optimal time switching(TS) factor. Simulation results show that for both PS and TS protocols, the proposed DF based bidirectional relay systems can improve the information rate as compared with the amplify-and-forward(AF) based bidirectional relay systems.

Rocket Propulsion Powered Using a Gyrotron

Abstract： This paper presents a review of a beamed energy propulsion rocket, the Microwave Rocket, WlllCn proauces propmslve thrust from millimeter-wave beams transferred from the ground. The thrust is generated through millimeter-wave discharge driven in a cylindrical thruster. As a high-power millimeter-wave generator, a Gyrotron is promising as the beam source. The salient benefit of Microwave Rockets is the resultant drastic cost reduction of mass transportation into space. We have already conducted launch experiments and have achieved continuous thrust generation under multi-pulse operation. Recently, a long-distance beam transfer system has been developed. Ignition tests have been conducted. The physics of the millimeter-wave discharge remain unclear. Additional studies using exoerimentation and calculations must be conducted to optimize the thrust generation.

High Performance Electrically Small Huygens Rectennas Enable Wirelessly Powered Internet of Things Sensing Applications:A Review

Far-field wireless power transfer(WPT)is a major breakthrough technology that will enable the many anticipated ubiquitous Internet of Things(IoT)applications associated with fifth generation(5G),sixth generation(6G),and beyond wireless ecosystems.Rectennas,which are the combination of rectifying circuits and antennas,are the most critical components in far-field WPT systems.However,compact application devices require even smaller integrated rectennas that simultaneously have large electromagnetic wave capture capabilities,high alternating current(AC)-to-direct current(DC)(AC-to-DC)conversion efficiencies,and facilitate a multifunctional wireless performance.This paper reviews various rectenna miniaturization techniques such as meandered planar inverted-F antenna(PIFA)rectennas;miniaturized monopole-and dipole-based rectennas;fractal loop and patch rectennas;dielectric-loaded rectennas;and electrically small near-field resonant parasitic rectennas.Their performance characteristics are summarized and then compared with our previously developed electrically small Huygens rectennas that are proven to be more suitable for IoT applications.They have been tailored,for example,to achieve batteryfree IoT sensors as is demonstrated in this paper.Battery-free,wirelessly powered devices are smaller and lighter in weight in comparison to battery-powered devices.Moreover,they are environmentally friendly and,hence,have a significant societal benefit.A series of high-performance electrically small Huygens rectennas are presented including Huygens linearly-polarized(HLP)and circularly-polarized(HCP)rectennas;wirelessly powered IoT sensors based on these designs;and a dual-functional HLP rectenna and antenna system.Finally,two linear uniform HLP rectenna array systems are considered for significantly larger wireless power capture.Example arrays illustrate how they can be integrated advantageously with DC or radio frequency(RF)power-combining schemes for practical IoT applications.