Prototyping and Experimentation of a Closed-Loop Wireless Power Transmission with Channel Acquisition and Waveform Optimization

Abstract: A systematic design of adaptive waveform for Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) has recently been proposed and shown through simulations to lead to significant performance benefits compared to traditional non-adaptive and heuristic waveforms. In this study, we design the first prototype of a closed-loop wireless power transfer system with adaptive waveform optimization based on Channel State Information acquisition. The prototype consists of three important blocks, namely the channel estimator, the waveform optimizer, and the energy harvester. Software Defined Radio (SDR) prototyping tools are used to implement a wireless power transmitter and a channel estimator, and a voltage doubler rectenna is designed to work as an energy harvester. A channel adaptive waveform with 8 sinewaves is shown through experiments to improve the average harvested DC power at the rectenna output by 9.8% to 36.8% over a non-adaptive design with the same number of sinewaves.