Novel Design of Conical-Shaped Wireless Charger for UAVs
The rapid increase in the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) across diverse applications—including surveillance, agriculture, infrastructure monitoring, and logistics—has amplified the need for reliable, safe, and autonomous power management solutions.
Most UAVs currently rely on lithium-polymer (Li-Po) batteries with limited energy density, restricting typical flight duration to 20–60 min depending on payload and environmental conditions . Frequent battery swapping or manual recharging imposes logistical challenges and reduces operational availability, particularly in remote or time-sensitive missions.
This work presents a novel wireless charging system for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which employs conical-shaped coils that also function as landing gear. By integrating electromagnetic simulation, circuit modeling, and system-level evaluation, we introduce an innovative coil design that enhances wireless power transfer (WPT) efficiency while reducing misalignment sensitivity.
The conical geometry naturally facilitates mechanical alignment upon drone landing, thereby improving inductive coupling. High-frequency simulations were carried out to optimize the coil parameters and evaluate the link efficiency at 6.78 MHz, an ISM-designated frequency. Our experimental testing confirmed that the proposed conical coil achieves high power transfer efficiency (up to 94%) under practical conditions, validating the effectiveness of the geometry.
The characteristics of the designed coil make it highly suitable for use with Class EF amplifiers operating in the same frequency range; however, detailed amplifier hardware implementation and efficiency characterization were beyond the scope of this study and are reserved for future work.
The results demonstrate the potential of the proposed system for deployment in UAV field applications such as surveillance, delivery, and remote sensing.
Source: MDPI
