Innovative modular and arrayed coil systems for ultrahigh efficiency in inductive heating and automated metal detection

Abstract

Induction systems have become increasingly more important and popular in our modern world and their application areas have widely expanded because of their high levels of safety and controllability. Today one important application of these induction systems is the inductive heating, which now finds use not only in conventional applications of point-source heating but also in new areas including all-surface heating with some degree of exibility in localization. The efficiency of such emerging systems, especially in planar structures across an entire surface, however, has thus far been limited compared to conventional inductive heating. In this thesis, to address these problems, we show a new class of strongly coupled planar coils that enhance magnetic coupling in square lattice stacking by design and with phase difference application in operation. These coils can be tiled in two-dimensional arrays in a modular fashion or to cover an arbitrarily large continuous surface. In a proof-of-concept realization, we experimentally demonstrated that these proposed outer squircle-inner circular coils outperform the conventional coils of circular shape. Using square-arrayed coil architecture, here we also present all-surface induction systems achieving uniform and enhanced heating speed for all loading positions no matter what the misalignment of the heated vessel with respect to the coils is. In addition, to solve the problems of automatically detecting metals over the whole surface together with determining their exact positions, we introduce a new method that relies on simultaneous wireless measurement and tracking of inductance-resistance of the coils at multiple frequencies to identify those coupled with the metal targets to be detected in the system. While pinpointing the location of the targeted metals, the proposed technique also identifies their material types. For future ubiquitous all-surface systems, this approach allows for automated sensing of metal vessels and powering the loaded coils for the highest possible performance independent of the specific location of each vessel with respect to coils. These findings indicate that the proposed innovative modular and arrayed coils enable, for the first time, full degree of exibility in localized inductive heating with space-invariance in all-surface heating.