A New Adaptive Wireless Power Transfer Solution for Use with Space Rovers and Vehicles

Abstract

Space rovers usually use solar power to power themselves. Unfortunately this can be impractical when exploring the dark side of a planet. To overcome this, a new adaptive wireless power solution is proposed for charging the rovers. The new wireless charging solution makes use of a directional coupler that acquires the difference between the incident and reflected mismatch of the wireless network; which is then sent to a gain & phase detector. The detector then sends this info to a processing microcontroller that computes an optimal impedance using a direct computational algorithm for maximum power transfer efficiency. The impedance is controlled using a tunable matching network which the microcontroller regulates. Recovered wireless power transfer efficiency (PTE) of greater than 99% (from less than 20% of PTE of initial mismatch) was achieved using this tuned method.