Optimization Design of an Inductive Energy Harvesting Device for Wireless Power Supply System Overhead High-Voltage Power Lines

Overhead high voltage power line (HVPL) online monitoring equipment is playing an increasingly important role in smart grids, but the power supply is an obstacle to such systems’ stable and safe operation, so in this work a hybrid wireless power supply system, integrated with inductive energy harvesting and wireless power transmitting, is proposed. The energy harvesting device extracts energy from the HVPL and transfers that from the power line to monitoring equipment on transmission towers by transmitting and receiving coils, which are in a magnetically coupled resonant configuration. In this paper, the optimization design of online energy harvesting devices is analyzed emphatically by taking both HVPL insulation distance and wireless power supply efficiency into account. It is found that essential parameters contributing to more extracted energy include large core inner radius, core radial thickness, core height and small core gap within the threshold constraints. In addition, there is an optimal secondary coil turn that can maximize extracted energy when other parameters remain fixed. A simple and flexible control strategy is then introduced to limit power fluctuations caused by current variations. The optimization methods are finally verified experimentally.