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Experimental Investigation of 3D Metamaterial

for Mid-range Wireless Power Transfer

A.L.A.K.Ranaweera, Thuc Phi Duong, Byoung-Suk Lee, and Jong-Wook Lee
Department of Electronics and Radio Engineering
Kyunghee University
1, Socheon-dong, Giheung-gu, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea
*jwlee@khu.ac.kr


Abstract We investigate a metamaterial structure to investigate
the potential of extending the WPT to mid-range distances.
Three-dimensional (3D) metamaterial structure is realized using
451-array of three-turn spiral resonators. By using the
designed metamaterial structure, we achieve 33% and 7.3%
efficiency improvements at 1.0 and 1.5 m distance between Tx/Rx
resonators, respectively. EM simulations are also performed and
verify that proposed metamaterial structure is capable of
enhancing the efficiency at mid-range distances.
Keywords- wireless power transfer, metamaterial, three turn
spiral resonatoe (3T-SR)

I. INTRODUCTION

The concept of Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) began
more than a century ago, with Nicola Teslas demonstration in
1899 [1]. Nowadays, WPT has become one of the fast moving
areas of research all over the world. This trend of research was
boosted by the reestablishment of Nicola Teslas original idea
by a group of researchers at MIT in 2007[2] as well as the
consumer demand for WPT products during the last few years.
Magnetic resonance coupling is the promising technology
behind most of the mid range WPT systems. Metamaterials are
artificial materials that can be flexibly engineered to have EM
properties such as negative refraction which are not exhibited
by naturally occurring materials [3]. In [4], Yaroslav et al.
presents a theoretical analysis on the possibility of using
metamaterials to enhance the mutual coupling between
magnetic dipoles and thereby the efficiency of WPT system
based on simplified assumptions. In [5], Bingnan Wang et al.
showed that metamaterial could be utilized to enhance the
evanescent-wave coupling for enhancing power transfer. At a
moderate distance of 0.5 m, they were able to increase the
transfer efficiency from 17% to 35% using 3D metamaterial.
However, experimental study on using metamaterial to enhance
WPT at midrange distance is still lacking.
In this paper, we experimentally show the potential of
utilizing three-turn spiral resonator (3T-SR) based 3D
metamaterial for increasing the power transfer range of WPT
system. To show the efficiency improvement experimentally,
we utilized WPT system designed in [6] operating at 6.5 MHz.
The experimental results with the proposed metamaterial
shows increased efficiency (33% and 7.3% improvements) at
1.0 and 1.5 m distances. The designed metamaterial structure
can be potentially utilized in extending the WPT into mid range
distances.

II. DESIGN AND SIMULATION

To enhance the transfer efficacy of WPT, it is sufficient to
use magnetic metamaterial which has only negative
permeability but positive permittivity [5]. There are several
approaches to realize negative permeability metamaterial.
When metamaterials are used for WPT enhancement, a higher
Q factor metamaterial is desired for better efficiency and longer
transfer distance. According to [7], spiral resonator based
metamaterial are shown to have a high-Q factor. In this work,
we utilize three-turn spiral resonator (3T-SR) to achieve
negative permeability. Our designed metamaterial has the
advantage of small electrical size and easy fabrication
compared to previously reported metamaterial for WPT in [5].
In order to adjust the frequency, we add high-Q variable
capacitor to the spiral resonator. Figure 1 shows the structure of
designed 3T-SR and real part of permeability extracted from
EM simulation results. The method described in [8] is
employed to extract the numerical value of permeability.

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
-10
-8
-6
-4
-2
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14


P
e
r
m
e
a
b
i
l
i
t
y

(

)
Frequency (MHz)
real()

Figure 1. 3T-SR structure and extracted permeability.


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By adjusting the value of variable capacitor added to the
spiral resonator, we are able to get permeability of -1 at 6.5
MHz. The result verifies the designed structure is operating as
magnetic metamaterial.


(a)

(b)
Figure 2. Comparison of H-field distribution of WPT system (a) with (b)
without proposed 3D metamaterial structure.

Figure 2 shows the H-field distribution of the WPT
system obtained with EM simulation with and without
proposed metamaterial structure. The increased H-field
intensity at the receiver results an improvement of transfer
efficiency of the system.

III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

The 3T-SR is fabricated on acrylic (=3) substrate of
thickness 1 mm using copper strips with thickness 0.2 mm.
Strip width is 7 mm, space between nearby strips is 3 mm and
outermost radius of the spiral is 7 cm. Unit cell size is 15 cm.
Variable capacitor is loaded into the spiral resonator to adjust
the resonance frequency. Using network analyzer (Agilent
8714ES) resonant frequency is measured. Unit cells are
arranged in cubic cell arrangement and they are assembled as
451-array to make 3D metamaterial having overall size of
60 cm75 cm15cm. At the operating frequency, wavelength
to unit cell size ratio is approximately 300 such that the
designed metamaterial is highly sub-wavelength metamaterial.
In order to show the enhanced WPT operation, 4 coil
WPT system designed in [6] has been utilized. The system
contains source loop, load loop, Tx and Rx coils resonating at
6.5 MHz. To demonstrate that the proposed metamaterial
structure is capable of extending the range of WPT system,
power transfer efficiency at midrange distances of 1.0 and 1.5
m is measured. Figure 3 shows the experimental setup
including the metamaterial structure placed between the Tx
and Rx resonators.

Figure 3. Experimental Setup including metamaterial structure

We measure the power transfer efficiency using S-
parameter measurements for the cases with and without
metamaterial structure in between the Tx and Rx. The
introduction of metamaterial structure into the WPT system
changes the matching condition. To remove the effect of
change of impedance matching, the distance between source
loop and TX resonator is adjusted to match the input
impedance to 50 so that the |S
11
| at the resonance is very
small. (See Figure 4 and Figure 6) Then the relative power
transfer efficiency is evaluated using |S
21
|
2
.
5.5 6.0 6.5 7.0 7.5
-50
-40
-30
-20
-10
0


S
1
1

w
i
t
h

M
e
t
a
m
a
t
e
r
i
a
l

(
d
B
)
Frequency (MHz)

Figure 4. Measured |S11| as a function of frequency at 1.0 m distance between
Tx and Rx

Figure 5 shows the experimental results of WPT system
when the distance between Tx and Rx resonators are kept at
1.0 m. Metamaterial structure is placed in the midpoint
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between the Tx and Rx resonators. WPT efficiency is
increased from 21% to 54% showing nearly 33%
improvement of efficiency by the introduction of 3D
metamaterial structure.
5.0 5.5 6.0 6.5 7.0 7.5 8.0
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70


E
f
f
i
c
i
e
n
c
y
(
%
)
Frequency (MHz)
w/o metamaterial
with metamaterial

Figure 5. Comparison of power transfer efficiency at 1.0 m distance
between TX and Rx coils.
5.0 5.5 6.0 6.5 7.0 7.5 8.0
-16
-14
-12
-10
-8
-6
-4
-2
0


S
1
1

w
i
t
h

M
e
t
a
m
a
t
e
r
i
a
l

(
d
B
)
Frequency (MHz)

Figure 6. Measured |S11| as a function of frequency at 1.5 m distance
between Tx and Rx coils.

5.0 5.5 6.0 6.5 7.0 7.5 8.0
0
5
10
15


E
f
f
i
c
i
e
n
c
y
(
%
)
Frequency (MHz)
Efficiency without Metamaterial
Efficiency with Metamaterial

Figure 7. Comparison of power transfer efficiency at 1.5 m distance between
TX and Rx coils.

Figure 7 shows WPT efficiency enhancements at a Tx/Rx
distance of 1.5 m. At this distance WPT efficiency is increased
from 4.2 to 11.5% showing an improvement of 7.3% in
efficiency. This verifies that the designed structure has
potential to extending the WPT system into mid-range
distances. In addition to efficiency improvement in both the
cases, the bandwidth of WPT operation range is also increased.
This is due to the mutual coupling between nearby 3T-SRs in
the metamaterial structure.
Results of proposed system is compared with similar
WPT systems reported previously at mid range distance. The
comparison highlights the potential of proposed metamaterial
in extending the WPT distance. Result of comparison is listed
in Table I. Because of the different size of coil structures,
normalized distance between Tx/Rx is used for the
comparison. In [9], 4 coil WPT systems working at 7.65 MHz,
similar to one we used here is utilized. In [10], helical shape
coil system with impedance matching network is utilized. The
results show that our proposed metamaterial structure has a
good potential for extending the range of WPT system into
mid range.
TABLE I. EFFICIENCY COMPARISON

Efficiency at normalized
distance of 3.3
Efficiency at normalized
distance of 5.0
[9] 49 % -
[10] 24 % 11.4 %
[6] 21 % 4.2 %
[6] with
metamaterial
*

54 % 11.5 %
*
The proposed WPT system in this paper
IV. CONCLUSION
In this study, we experimentally investigate the possibility
of extending the WPT distance in to midranges using a 3T-SR
based 3D metamaterials. By introducing the designed
metamaterial structure into the WPT system, we could obtain
33% and 7.3% improvement in WPT efficiency at Tx/Rx
distances of 1.0 m and 1.5 m respectively. Even though the
bulkiness of the designed metamaterial is a disadvantage, this
study will have high impact on the WPT application working
on mid-range distances. Reducing the bulkiness while keeping
the efficiency at the same level will be the subject of future
study.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research was supported by the Basic Science Research
Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea
(NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and
Technology (No. 2012-001327).
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978-1-4799-2923-8/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE 95 WPTC 2014