Strongly coupled outer squircle-inner circular coil architecture for enhanced induction over large areas

Abstract

This paper reports a newly designed class of strongly coupled planar coil structures for the purpose of enhanced induction over large areas. These new architectures feature a squircle shape at the outer rim with rounded corners and straight sides evolved into a fully circular shape in the inner side, which proves to be essential to achieve high efficiency in arrays and all-surface inductive heating. As a proof-of-demonstration, a simple inductive heating system composed of a pair of side-by-side placed coils was constructed together with a ferrite layer. Experiments were repeated for 0° and 180° phase differences between coil currents. Here, the system efficiency was shown to be increased overall by 37.4% using outer squircle-inner circular coils instead of conventional circular coils. This comparative study indicates that the proposed coil architecture offers the potential for large-area, fast, and phase-insensitive inductive heating with high efficiency.