A systematic design of adaptive waveform for Wireless Power Transfer (WPT)
has recently been proposed and shown through simulations to lead to significant
performance benefits compared to traditional non-adaptive and heuristic
waveforms. In this study, we design the first prototype of a closed-loop
wireless power transfer system with adaptive waveform optimization based on
Channel State Information acquisition. The prototype consists of three
important blocks, namely the channel estimator, the waveform optimizer, and the
energy harvester. Software Defined Radio (SDR) prototyping tools are used to
implement a wireless power transmitter and a channel estimator, and a voltage
doubler rectenna is designed to work as an energy harvester. A channel adaptive
waveform with 8 sinewaves is shown through experiments to improve the average
harvested DC power at the rectenna output by 9.8% to 36.8% over a non-adaptive
design with the same number of sinewaves.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE WPTC 201