Evaluation of Additive Manufacturing for Wireless Power Transfer Applications

Additive manufacturing (AM) has emerged as an economical and feasible technology for creating industrial components. This article evaluates the use of AM for inductive wireless power transfer (WPT) systems. In particular, the innovative use of metal 3-D printing is proposed as a manufacturing process for the coils. For this reason, the recent improvement of metal AM is proposed as a suitable solution to increase design opportunities, reduce costs and production time while improving transmission efficiency. In fact, the WPT coil current distribution can be preliminarily studied through finite element analysis (FEA) to optimize its cross section and geometry. In this work, a general design procedure for WPT coils using metal AM is presented and this technology is compared with traditional solutions (i.e., hollow and litz wire) through extensive experimental measurements. The analysis shows that AM allows to reduce the parasitic resistance, costs, and weight while increasing the transmission efficiency. Thus, the obtained results confirm the potential of AM for producing WPT coils, nominating this technology as a flexible, sustainable, and rapid solution for custom WPT coils production.