LAUSR

This article develops a new method of data-driven modeling for a class of multiple-transmitter single-receiver wireless power transfer (WPT) systems. A continuous-time multiple-input single-output (MISO) model with pure time delays is used to characterize the input–output behavior of the system, where the transfer functions associated with each input channel are not constrained to have the same denominator. Moreover, the time delays are allowed to be a fraction of the sampling interval in order to account for the delay effects that stem from circuit components and wireless communication, which are, by nature, often a fraction of the sampling interval. An optimal refined instrumental variable method is proposed to estimate the parameters and time delays of the MISO model based on sampled input–output data. In contrast to the conventional circuit-theory-based modeling methods that rely on circuit parameters and result in models which are often complex, the proposed data-based method yields parsimonious models, whose parameters are directly estimated from input–output data. Due to the easy availability of sampled data in control engineering applications, the proposed method is clearly more user-friendly, having a broad prospect for efficient operation of WPT systems, such as prediction, optimization, and control. Numerical and experimental results are presented to validate the effectiveness and merit of the proposed method.