Design and Implementation of Photovoltaic Array for Integration of Visible Light Communication and Wireless Power Transfer Systems

Abstract

The integration of visible light communication (VLC) and wireless power transfer (WPT) offers a sustainable platform for powering Internet of Things (IoT) devices while enabling simultaneous data transmission. However, conventional receivers based on a single photovoltaic (PV) cell are constrained by the inherent trade-off between bandwidth and output power. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a PV array-based solution and designs its circuit topology, achieving both high output power and extended bandwidth. An equivalent circuit model of the PV array is established to facilitate theoretical analysis, and the transfer function is derived to evaluate system performance. Furthermore, the influences of different array configurations and peripheral circuits are investigated, leading to the adoption of an optimized bridged-T-coil structure. Numerical simulations and comparative experiments on 4-cell array configuration demonstrate that the proposed bridged-T-coil topology achieves a $3.13\times $ bandwidth enhancement and nearly quadrupled output power compared to a single PV cell. Furthermore, when evaluated against the average bandwidth-power product (BW $\times P_{\max }$ ) of the five other internally developed array architectures for a fair comparison, the bridged-T-coil array yields a value of 93.81, exceeding their mean performance by approximately 20.7% on average. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first systematic design and investigation into the circuit topology and performance of a PV array receiver for VLC-WPT systems, and provides a practical receiver solution for low-power IoT nodes requiring integrated energy and communication capabilities.