Hybrid Wireless Power Transfer
Xu Chen, Shengbao Yu
Key Laboratory of Earth Information Detection
Instrumentation, Ministry of Education;
College of Instrumentation and Electrical Engineering,
Jilin University, Changchun, China
chenxu16@mails.jlu.edu.cn
yushengbao@jlu.edu.cn
Abstract—Both magnetic field and electric field can be
used for transferring power wirelessly. But the up-to-date
researches on wireless power transfer have been either
inductive power transfer (magnetic field) or capacitive
power transfer (electric field). An improved power
transfer mode called hybrid wireless power transfer
(HWPT) is proposed and evaluated in this paper. Power is
transferred from primary side to secondary side through
magnetic field and electric field at the same time with a
single DC power supply and inverter. Theoretical
modeling and derivation are carried out to validate the
feasibility of the proposed power transfer mode. A
comparison between HWPT, inductive power transfer
(IPT) and capacitive power transfer (CPT) is presented.
The advantages and disadvantages of the proposed
wireless power transfer form are studied.
Keywords—Wireless Power Transfer (WPT); Capacitive
Power Transfer (CPT); Inductive Power Transfer (IPT);
Hybrid Wireless Power Transfer (HWPT)
I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless power transfer (WPT) has a wide market
prospect due to the increasing market share of electric vehicles
and the strong desire of charging consumer electronics without
wiring. A huge amount of researches and commercial efforts
have been done to realize the wireless power transfer. But the
methods used for wireless power so far have been either
inductive power transfer (IPT) as shown in Figure 1(a) [1][2]
or capacitive power transfer (CPT) as shown in Figure 1(b)
[3][4].
Compensation networks are usually used in inductive
power transfer system and capacitive power transfer system.
For IPT in Figure 1(a), the inverter operates at the resonant
frequency formed by L1 and C1. The secondary side resonant
components L2, C2 are also tuned to the same frequency of the
primary side. For CPT in Figure 1(b), inverter operates at the
series resonant frequency of components L3, C3 and C4.
The coupling coefficient of the WPT system is defined as
k = M / L1 ⋅ L2
(1)
l-)))
Xiaobo Yang
Corporate Research
ABB (China) Limited
Beijing, China
xiaobo.yang@cn.abb.com
Where L1 and L2 are the self-inductances of the primary and
secondary side respectively and M is the mutual inductance of
the two sides.
For WPT system, the coupling coefficient k is a key
parameter that has a strong effect on the performance of the
system. A larger coupling coefficient can make the power
transfer much easier with higher efficiency, lower EMF and
better lateral tolerance. Unfortunately, the coupling coefficient
is contradicted to the transfer distance. A lot of effort has
been done to improve the performance of WPT system like
optimizing the coil structure [5][6] of the inductive power
transfer system, optimizing the compensation network [7] of
the transmitter and receiver coil or optimizing the inverter [8]
and rectifier circuit [9] using soft switching topologies and so
on.
Fig.1. Schematic of (a) inductive power transfer system and (b) capacitive
power transfer system.
For inductive power transfer system, the equivalent
coupling coefficient can be improved by increasing the coil
area. For capacitive power transfer system, increasing the
capacitor plate area can also get a higher capacitor value thus
increase the equivalent coupling coefficient.
However, the available area and space are usually very
limited in some applications such as smart phone. It would be
very valuable if the same amount of power can be transferred
wirelessly with a smaller receiver pad. Moreover, being
compatible with the 5V charger, which is the wired charging
voltage of smart phone through USB port, is an ideal solution
so that the phone manufacturer does not need to offer two

chargers with different output voltage for wired power transfer
and wireless power transfer respectively.
To solve the above-mentioned problem, an improved
wireless power form called hybrid wireless power transfer
(HWPT) is proposed and evaluated in this paper.
II. MODELING AND DERIVATION
Fig.2 shows the circuit schematic of the proposed HWPT
system. C1 and L1 form the primary side of the inductive
power transfer branch, in which L1 is the inductance of the
primary side coil; L2 and C2 form the secondary side of the
inductive power transfer branch, in which L2 is the inductance
of the secondary side coil. L3, C3 and C4 form the capacitive
power transfer branch, in which C3 and C4 is the capacitors
formed by four plates. Two of these plates are connected to
the primary side and the other two plates are connected two
the receiver side like smart phone. Note that it is not isolated
for capacitive power transfer as the electric field is used as the Fig.3. Equivalent circuit of HWPT.
carrier of power. The primary side IPT branch and CPT
branch are parallel connected to a single high frequency ­ § 1 ·
inverter. The secondary side of the IPT and CPT branches are ° U s = ¨ R1 + jω L1 + ¸ I1 + jω MI 2
connected to two rectifiers respectively and the outputs of ° © jω C ¹
these two rectifiers are connected to two loads. ® (3)
°0 = jω MI + § R + jω L + 1 ·
+ RL1 ¸ I 2
° 1 ¨ 2 2
¯ © jω C2 ¹
Where R1 and R2 are the AC resistors of primary and
secondary coils. ω is the angular frequency of the
fundamental AC components. M is the mutual inductance
between the primary side coil and secondary side coil. M can
be expressed as
M = k L1 L2 (4)
Where k represents the coupling coefficient of L1
and L2. Solving expression (3), the whole secondary side
Fig.2. Schematic of the proposed hybrid wireless power transfer (HWPT) and the primary side coil can be simplified as a reflected
impedance, which is expressed as
system (a) IPT branch (b) CPT branch.
(ω M )
2
Fig.3 shows the equivalent circuit of the proposed HWPT
circuit. The primary side inverter is simplified to an AC Z ref 1 = (5)
1
voltage source. Three resonant tanks can be found in this R2 + jω L2 + + RL1
circuit, i.e. (L1, C1), (L2, C2) and (L3, C3, C4). All of them are jω C2
tuned to the same resonant frequency which is also the system This reflected impedance is influenced by secondary coil
operation frequency of the primary side AC source. The resistance, loading resistance and the mutual inductance of the
frequency of the AC source is two sides. How these parameters influence the system
1 1 1 (2) efficiency will be further derived in part C.
FUs = = =
2π L1C1 2π L2 C2 C3C4 B. Modeling of CPT Branch
2π L3
C3 + C4
Similar to the IPT branch, a Kirchhoff's formula can also
A. Modeling of IPT Branch be derived as
According to the Kirchhoff's voltage law, voltage of the
U s = I 2 Z ref 2 (6)
IPT primary side and secondary side can be expressed as [10] Where Z ref 2 is the reflected impedance of CPT
branch
1 1
Z ref 2 = jω L3 + RL 2 + R3 + + (7)
jωC3 jωC4


C. Theoretical Maximum Efficiency III. DESIGN GUIDELINE AND CONSIDERATION
In this Section, a simplified design guideline and
consideration of the HWPT system are presented.
Taking the design of a HWPT system for wireless
charging of smart phone as example. Fig.5 gives the exploded
view of smart phone with HWPT system. It’s well known that
the space inside the state-of-art smart phone is very limited.
With HWPT system, the shielding aluminum plate can be used
as the receiver side capacitor plate to from the CPT branch of
HWPT system.
The capacitance between shielding aluminum plate and
primary side plate is estimated based on
S
Fig.4. Simplified equivalent circuit of HWPT.
C = ε ⋅ ε0 (16)
d
Where S is the area of the shielding aluminum plate, for
Based on the derivation of part A. and part B., the HWPT smart phone the S is around 30-80 cm2; For laptop, this value
circuit can be further simplified as Fig.4. According to is around 600-1000 cm2; for cars, this value can be even larger
Kirchhoff's current law to cover the whole car chassis. d is the distance between two
I s = I1 + I 2 (8) plates which will vary from several millimeters in laptop
and Kirchhoff's voltage law charging system to fifteen centimeters in car charging system,
U s = I 2 Z ref 2 = I1 ( R1 + jω L1 + Z ref 1 ) (9) ε 0 represent the permittivity of vacuum (8.86e-12 F/m) and
ε is the permittivity of the material between two plates.
The power transfer efficiency of CPT branch is Another design consideration is the inductive heating
RL 2 problem of state-of-the-art IPT system. The high frequency
ηCPT = (10)
magnetic field will generate eddy current in the metallic
RL 2 + R3
components and ICs of the smart phone, which not only
And the power transfer efficiency of the IPT branch is the decreases the power transfer efficiency but also affects the
product of primary efficiency and secondary efficiency, shown function of smart phone and may even cause safety problem
as expression (11) like battery explosion and fire. To solve this problem the CPT
RL1 Z ref 1 plate should be large enough to shielding as much magnetic
η IPT = (11) field as possible to lighten the inductive heating problem.
RL1 + R2 Z ref 1 + R1
Combining (4) and (10), the ηIPT can be expressed as
RL1
R2 QIPT 2
η IPT = ⋅ (12)
RL1 R
+ 1 L1 +1 + QIPT 2
R2 R2
Where QIPT is the transfer quality factor of the two coils
Fig.5. Exploded view of the superposition of IPT and CPT charging pad in
ωM
QIPT = (13) the proposed HWPT system.
R1 R2
IV. SIMULATION
And LM is the loading ratio of IPT branch In order to evaluate the power transfer ability of the
R proposed HWPT system, a simulation has been performed
LM = L1 (14) between IPT, CPT and HWPT topologies. The simulation
R2 circuit of the HWPT system is shown as Fig.6. The values of
The maximum efficiency ηM can be obtained when input voltage, output loading, and operation frequency are the
same for these topologies; the parameters of gate diver,
∂η IPT / ∂LM = 0 , which is primary side H bridge and secondary side rectifier and output
QIPT 2 LM filter are identical for IPT, CPT and HWPT system. The
ηM = (15) simulation parameters of the rest components are listed in
1 + LM + QIPT 1 + LM
2
Table I. The resonant frequencies of all the resonant tanks are
tuned to be 2.06 MHz.


Fig.6. Simulation schematic of HWPT system.

TABLE I. SIMULATION PARAMETERS OF HWPT AND IPT

SYSTEMS

Components HWPT IPT CPT

L1 9ȝH 9ȝH /
L2 9ȝH 9ȝH /
L3 24ȝH / 24ȝH
C1 1nF 1nF /
C2 1nF 1nF /
C3 500pF / 500pF
C4 500pF / 500pF
R1 500mȍ 500mȍ /
R2 500mȍ 500mȍ /
R3 100mȍ / 100mȍ
6LPXODWLRQWLPH V
Freq 2.06MHz 2.06MHz 2.06MHz
(b)

6LPXODWLRQWLPH V
(c)
6LPXODWLRQWLPH V
Fig.7. Simulation waveforms of HWPT system (a) input and output
(a) voltage/current (b) zoom in of input and output voltage/current and (c)
currents of IPT and CPT.


The simulation result is shown in Fig.7. To be compatible with
wired charger, the input voltage is set as 5V. The input current,
output voltage and output current is shown in Fig.7(a). Fig.7(b)
is the zoom in waveforms of input voltage, input current,
output voltage and output current. Fig.7(c) gives the resonant
current of different resonant tanks of HWPT system, in which:
the top subplot is the resonant current of CPT branch; the
middle subplot is the resonant current of primary side of IPT
branch and the bottom subplot is resonant current of the
secondary side of IPT branch. It can be observed that the
currents of these resonant tanks are about 2.5A and the
currents of all three resonant tanks are sin wave with the same
frequency as that of the inverter. The current phase of CPT
branch leads those of IPT branch for about 30°.
Fig.8. Output power of HWPT, IPT and CPT.
Fig.9. Efficiency of HWPT, IPT and CPT.
Fig.8 shows the comparison of output power of three
different power transfer forms. The rest of the simulation
conditions are identical except for the power transfer medium.
Green curve represents the output power of HWPT system;
Blue curve is the output power of CPT system and the red
curve is the output power of IPT system. The peak output
power of HWPT system is 4.3W while the peak output power
of IPT and CPT are 3W and 2.8W respectively. The output
power of HWPT is higher than IPT and CPT in a wide load
range.
Fig.9 shows the power transfer efficiency of HWPT, IPT
and CPT system, from which we can see that the power
transfer efficiency of CPT are higher than both IPT and
HWPT system. The efficiency of IPT and HWPT increase
with the increase of loading resisters but the efficiency of CPT
first increase and then decrease slowly when load resistance is

higher than 45˖. The amount of power that can be transferred
to the secondary side would decrease as load increases. The
efficiency of HWPT system at peak output power is 50%; the
efficiency of IPT and CPT at peak output power is 38% and
74% respectively. This result is reasonable as the wireless
power transfer through capacitor is almost lossless while
through inductor will generate loss because of the coil
resistance.
V. CONCLUSION
An improved hybrid wireless power transfer (HWPT)
method that combines inductive power transfer and capacitive
power transfer with a single inverter is proposed. The
introduced “two branches with a single inverter” power
transfer method reaches higher coupling coefficient thus
higher output power with the same input voltage and load
condition. Detailed equivalent circuit modeling and derivation
of HWPT is presented for better understanding and the
theoretical prediction is verified by computer simulation. The
output power of HWPT is higher than IPT and CPT in a wide
load range. But the efficiency of HWPT (50% at 4.3W) is in
the middle of CPT(74% at 3W) and IPT (38% at 2.8W) with
the same input voltage and load conditions.
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