To meet the power supply requirements of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in dynamic ocean environments, this study proposes a wireless power transfer (WPT) system for AUVs, incorporating novel nanocrystalline flake ribbon cores. The proposed system utilizes the excellent magnetic field concentrating and shielding characteristics of nanocrystalline materials. The flake ribbons are fabricated by compressing dielectric materials mixed with nanocrystalline ribbons, which effectively reduces eddy-current loss. The layout arrangement of nanocrystalline materials is investigated, and a magnetic coupler employing ribbon-type nanocrystalline materials is adopted based on simulation analysis and comparison. The influence of nanocrystalline materials on the mutual inductance distribution between the transmitting and receiving coils is explored. Considering the potential positional misalignments between the transmitting and receiving coils in practical marine environments, the misalignment tolerance of the system is comprehensively analyzed and experimentally verified. An experimental prototype is established, and the results demonstrate that the proposed magnetic coupler design significantly improves the performance of the WPT system. Compared with the conventional WPT system without nanocrystalline flake ribbon cores, the proposed design effectively increases the power transfer efficiency by 2.99% and greatly stabilizes the output power by 36%. This study validates the effectiveness and practicability of using nanocrystalline flake ribbon cores in WPT systems for AUV applications.
Wen et al. (Sat,) studied this question.