IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO.

5, MAY 2012

2453

Link Budget and Capacity Performance of Inductively

Coupled Resonant Loops
Umar Azad, Student Member, IEEE, Hengzhen Crystal Jing, Member, IEEE, and
Yuanxun Ethan Wang, Senior Member, IEEE

AbstractA near field power transfer equation for an inductively coupled near field system, analogous to Friis transmission
equation for far field communications, is derived based on the
equivalent circuit model of the coupled resonant loops. Experimental results show the proposed near field coupling equation is
trustworthy as it correctly predicts the transferred power versus
distance relationship for different values of loaded quality factors
at the transmitter and the receiver. Capacity performance of near
field communication (NFC) links are analyzed based on information theory, respectively for noise limited and interference limited
scenarios. The analytical results provide guidelines for power and
capacity budget in inductively coupled antenna systems. Examples
of inductively coupled VLF NFC links are evaluated for different
operating scenarios, demonstrating the efficacy and importance of
the proposed method for near field link budget.
Index TermsInductive coupling, near field communication
system, nonradiative power transfer, undersea communications,
very-low frequency/ultra-low frequency (VLF/ULF), wireless
power transfer.

I. INTRODUCTION

NDUCTIVELY coupled near field system is a short-range

wireless technology which allows the devices to communicate through the coupling of magnetic field rather than the energy radiation-interception process in far field communications.
The technology has been used or proposed in many application
areas such as wireless power transfer [1], contactless power and
information transmission in drilling machines [2], wireless powering of implantable systems [3], [4], RFID [5], health monitoring [6], real time location system [7], inductively coupled
electric highway system [8] and seamless coverage of littoral
mine warfare operations in shallow water, surf and beach zones
[9]. To evaluate the performance of near field energy transfer
links, the power transfer efficiency of strongly coupled loops
has been derived based on the coupled mode theory [1] and
voltage gain expression has been derived based on equivalent
circuit model in [10] for the configuration consisting of coupled
coils with additional driving loops. It is observed that resonance
Manuscript received August 18, 2010; revised June 08, 2011; accepted
November 11, 2011. Date of publication March 09, 2012; date of current
version May 01, 2012. This work was supported by Office of Naval Research
Award N000140810083.
U. Azad and Y. E. Wang are with the Electrical Engineering Department at
University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095 USA (e-mail:
umarazad@ucla.edu).
H. C. Jing is with the QuinStar Technology Inc., Torrance, CA 90505 USA.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2012.2189696

plays an essential role in power transfer mechanisms and it improves the efficiency over the case of inductively coupled nonresonant objects. A near field propagation equation is also proposed in [11] in which the path gain concept is introduced to incorporate different rate of path loss of the electromagnetic field
in a NF system. However, concerns are often raised regarding
how the properties of antennas and impedance terminations impact on the performance of the near field system. This issue is
addressed here by deriving the power transfer relationship of
inductively coupled resonant loops, in a simplified setup consisting of transmitter and receiver coils that connect to variable
source and load impedances respectively. It leads to a concise
formulation called near field power transfer equation, which expresses the transferred power in a function of distances between
the loops, dimensions and intrinsic quality factors of the loops
and terminating impedances at both the transmitter and the receiver. Some preliminary results for weak coupling cases have
been reported in [12]. In this paper, with insights gained from the
near field power transfer equation, a comprehensive discussion
is carried out for both strong coupling and weak coupling cases,
aiming for applications respectively in wireless power transfer
and in near field communications (NFC). It shows in strong coupling cases, an optimal load termination condition exists for a
given distance, which maximizes the power transfer efficiency
at this distance, while in weak coupling cases the received power
always reaches to its maximum under the conjugate matching
condition. When the coupling is weak, the received power falls
off inversely with the sixth power of the distance between the
coils but increases with improving quality factors of the transmitting and receiving antennas. However, the benefit brought by
use of high quality factor coils to the capacity of a NFC system
is limited as the increasing quality factor eventually limits the
bandwidth of the communication system. In general, a loaded
quality factor other than the conjugate matching may provide
the best tradeoff between the received power and communication bandwidth for the maximum capacity.
This paper is organized as follows. Section II presents the
derivation of the near field power transfer equation and the applications of this equation in both strong and weak coupling
cases. The experimental results in Section III validate the proposed theory. The capacity performance of a NFC link is discussed in Section IV based on Shannons information theory for
both thermal noise and natural interference limited scenarios.
In Section V, a very-low frequency/ultra-low frequency (VLF/
ULF) NFC link in air is used as an example and its information capacity versus distance is analyzed with numerical simulations for different setups of impedance matching. It concludes
that there is an optimum loaded quality factor selection for both

0018-926X/$31.00 2012 IEEE

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 5, MAY 2012

More accurate expressions for mutual impedance for various

configurations and shapes of single layer and multi-layer coils
are given in [13][15]. The self-inductance of transmitter and
receiver coils and the mutual inductance between the two coils
in free space (see Appendix) are given by
(1)
(2)

To quantify the strength of the coupling between the coils, the

coupling coefficient is defined as it is in [5]
(3)
where is the mutual inductance induced by the inductive coupling between the two coils. Substituting (1) and (2) into (3),
the coupling coefficient between the two coils in free space is
yielded as

Fig. 1. (a) Inductively coupled near field system. (b) Equivalent circuit model
of near field system.

transmitting and receiving loops that results in the maximum

capacity for a certain distance of communication for both noise
and natural interference limited scenarios.
II. THEORETICAL ANALYSIS
The near field system consisting of inductively coupled resonant loops is shown in Fig. 1(a). Two circular coils,
, and
of radii
and , respectively, are centered on a single
axis facing each other in their normal direction. The transmitter
and the receiver are separated by a distance . The coils consist
of
and
closely wound turns and carry currents and
respectively. As dimensions of coils and distances between the
two coils under consideration are much smaller than the wavelength of the electromagnetic wave, magnetostatic approximations can thus be applied, which leads to the equivalent circuit
model in Fig. 1(b).
and
are the resistances of the coils
at the operating frequency including Ohmic loss resistance, radiation resistance and other losses such as the absorption of the
surroundings, ,
are the self-inductances of the coils and
,
are the capacitors to resonate with the transmitters and
receivers coil at an identical frequency in order to create the
maximum coupling sensitivity.
and
are the source and
load impedances respectively.
A. Self Inductance, Mutual Coupling, and Coupling Coefficient
Under the assumption of infinitesimal thickness of the coil,
the property of homogeneous magnetic field inside a solenoid
is used as a coarse approximation to the field distribution of
the loop antenna. The accuracy of these approximations is to
be examined against COMSOL simulation results in Section V.

(4)
It shows that the coupling coefficient between two conductor
coils in free space is frequency independent and varies with the
inverse cube of the distance, i.e.,
when the distance between transmitter and receiver is much larger than the radius of
transmitter and receiver coils i.e.,
, . This coincides
with the near field of an infinitesimal loop, which is in the order
of
.
In a homogeneous lossy medium, the attenuation effect of
the lossy material on the coupling coefficient needs to be included. The coupling coefficient between the two coils in a lossy
medium is then modified to be
(5)
where is the attenuation constant of the medium. For antennas
other than loops, coupling coefficient may take different forms
but will in general be in the same magnitude unless higher order
resonant modes [16] are used, in which case, a more directive
coupling but a faster attenuation rate versus distance is expected
as predicted by the spatial distribution of the near field of those
higher order modes.
B. Near Field Power Transfer Equation
To setup the inductively coupled resonant loops, one must
use capacitors to resonate with the self-inductance of the coils
in both transmitter and receiver at the same resonant frequency
, as shown in Fig. 1(b). In general,
the mutual coupling between two coils affects the impedance
seen from either the transmitter side or the receiver side. As the

AZAD et al.: LINK BUDGET AND CAPACITY PERFORMANCE OF INDUCTIVELY COUPLED RESONANT LOOPS

self-reactance of the coils are cancelled out by those of the resonating capacitors, the currents and flowing at the transmitter and receiver coils satisfies the following relationship,

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C. Power Transfer Under Strong Coupling Assumption

where is the source voltage. Simultaneously solving the two

equations in (6) yields the current in receiver coil

When
is close to one, e.g.,
is comparable
to
, it implies the coupling is strong
enough to create a non-negligible effect on the impedance match
in either the transmitter or the receiver. This is so-called strong
coupling region [1] in which wireless power transfer often operates. It is evident from (10) that a high power transfer efficiency
necessitates use of high
coils such that
and
. Equation (10) thus reduces to

(7)

(11)

Consequently the generalized expression for received power

It concludes from (11) that the received power is maximized

when
, yielding a perfect power transfer efficiency
, e.g.,

(6)

is

(12)

(8)
where
is the available power from the source at
the transmitter. In Fig. 1(b), applying the definition of quality
factors to both the transmitting and receiving resonators yields

Theoretically 100% efficient power transfer for lossless coils

can be obtained for any distance as long as an appropriate
impedance transformation is used so that
. This
optimum matching condition requires adjusting the source or
load impedance for different distances, which may be realized
by inserting variable ratio voltage transformers between the
transmitter/receiver and the coils. For coils with finite quality
factors, the maximum power transfer efficiency
can be
approximately given by substituting the above condition into
(10)
(13)

(9)
and
are the loaded quality factors of the transwhere
mitter and the receiver;
and
are the intrinsic quality
factors of the transmitting and receiving antennas. Substituting
(9) into (8), the received power can thus be written as a function
of the quality factors

D. Power Transfer Under Weak Coupling Assumption

For the case of weak coupling, the effect of the mutual coupling between the two coils on the impedance seen from the
transmitter side can be ignored. The currents and , respectively, at the transmitter and the receiver at the resonant frequency are given by

(14)
(10)
The received power under weak coupling assumption is
Equation (10) is so-called near field power transfer equation,
which reveals the impact of impedance terminations and antenna quality factors on near field power transfer. Though the
equation was derived based on the equivalent circuit of coupled
resonant loops, one can generalize this relationship for other resonators coupled through near field. The intrinsic quality factors
of antennas are limited by the loss at the coils including both
the radiation and conduction loss. As typically antennas with
extremely small electrical sizes are used in near field systems,
their radiation loss can often be ignored and the intrinsic quality
factors are limited by the Ohmic loss of coils, which is primarily
determined by the conductivity and the cross-section of the wire
[4].

(15)
On the other hand, the weak coupling case implies
, as
and as expected the
generalized power transfer (8) reduces to (15) by applying this
approximation.
Near field power transfer equation under weak coupling assumption shows that the received power through inductive coupling in near field communication system is proportional to the
square of the coupling coefficient , the loaded quality factors

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 5, MAY 2012

Fig. 2. Experimental setup for near field power transfer measurements.

, , and it rolls off at the rate of

, in contrast to the far
field power rolling off in the order of
. This rapid rolling off
behavior provides near field system more advantages for communications in short ranges as less likely a near field system
interferes with other systems outside a certain range [11].
The termination efficiency at the transmitter and receiver
is characterized by the coupling factor
and
, respectively. To maximize the received power
through the coupling, the critical coupling condition [17]
should be selected both at the transmitter and at the receiver,
e.g.,
and
and the received power
under this condition is thus
(16)
and
should be made as high as
It is evident that
possible to maximize the power coupled through under both the
strong and the weak coupling assumption.
III. EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION OF NEAR FIELD
POWER TRANSFER EQUATION
In order to validate the near field power transfer equation,
two coils of 5-cm radius and 24 tightly packed turns are built
using a copper wire of 1-mm radius. The self-inductance of the
coil computed using (1) is 58.4 H while the measured value
of the self-inductance using the 4342A Q-meter is 60 H. With
330 pf capacitors attached to both coils, the resonant frequency
is observed at 1.06 MHz. The quality factor of both coils at
1.06 MHz measured using 4342A Q-meter is 59. Therefore the
transmitter and receiver coil resistance calculated from (9) is
6.75 . The transmitter is an arbitrary waveform generator with
the standard 50- output impedance and the receiver is a digital
oscilloscope with 50- input impedance. The source voltage
is 10 volts peak-to-peak and therefore the maximum available
power from the transmitter is 0.25 watts. The experimental setup
of the near field power transfer is shown in Fig. 2. Two coils are
placed normal to each other with centers aligned in one line,
which are connected to both the transmitter and the receiver
through voltage transformers.
By selecting the turn ratio of the voltage transformer among
8:3, 1:1, and 3:8, one can obtain source and load terminations
with three different loaded quality factors of 29.5, 7, and 1.1
alternatively. The received power is measured for different
distances and compared with the calculated received power in

Fig. 3. Measured received power (dBm) and calculated received power plotted
(dBm) using generalized power transfer equation and power transfer equation
derived under weak coupling assumption against Distance between same Coils
(cm) on a log scale for different values of loaded Q of transmitter and receiver.

Fig. 3. The three groups of curves plotted in Fig. 3 in different

colors correspond to high-Q, medium-Q, and low-Q terminations, respectively.
Within each group, solid, dashed, and dotted lines are representing the measured result, the result calculated with the near
field power transfer (10), and the result calculated with the equation under weak coupling assumption (15). In general, all the
curves within each group converge at far distances when coupling is weak. The discrepancy between the dotted curves and
other curves at close distances can be attributed to the weak coupling assumption used in deriving (15), as the measured result
agrees well with the calculated result without such an assumption even at close distances. The coupled power increases monotonically when distance draws closer until the coupling is strong
enough to affect the impedance matching so that the condition
of
no longer holds. It is observed that the coupled power indeed reaches to the peak at the proximity of the
distance satisfying
for all cases except the low-Q
case where the distance satisfying such a condition is out of the
measured range.
Among the three groups of curves, lower power is observed
for lower Q cases at far distances, while the high-Q case exhibits the greatest transferred power as it operates at the critical
coupling condition. However, the medium-Q case has greater
measured power transfer efficiency than that in the high-Q case
at close distances as the strong coupling condition kicks in. The
measured maximum power transfer efficiency for any distance
is 72.1% for the medium-Q case and 21.1% for the high-Q case
versus the theoretical predictions of 77.7% and 25% respectively given by (13).
IV. CAPACITY PERFORMANCE OF NFC LINK
To discuss the capacity performance of a NFC system under
the weak coupling assumption, the ShannonHartley theorem

AZAD et al.: LINK BUDGET AND CAPACITY PERFORMANCE OF INDUCTIVELY COUPLED RESONANT LOOPS

defining the capacity of a digital communication system is

introduced
(17)
is the bandwidth in Hz,
is the received power and
where
is total noise power at the receiver over the bandwidth
.
Therefore, when a digital communication link is built upon near
field coupling mechanism, not only the transferred power, but
also the bandwidth of the communication system is of importance to the capacity performance of such a link. The fractional
bandwidth of a NFC system can be estimated from the loaded
quality factors of the transmitter and the receiver through the
following:

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B. Capacity Performance in Natural Interference Limited

Scenario
In many situations, natural interference caused by lightning
in the ionosphere may become the main source of the receiver
noise. This is particular the case when the system operates at low
frequencies such as ELF/VLF bands [18]. The received interference power from ELF/VLF noise is derived (see Appendix)
(21)
where

The capacity performance of such a system is thus given by

(18)
where is the center frequency. A termination based on critical
coupling increases the signal to noise ratio by improving the
received power, yet it may not offer the optimal system capacity
as the signal bandwidth may be sacrificed. It suggests that the
transferred power and the bandwidth of a NFC system must be
traded-off for the optimal capacity.
The source of the noises in the receiver can be either natural
interference
dominated or thermal noise
dominated, and
the total receiver noise
is the sum of natural interference
and thermal noise. The capacity performance of such a system
is further discussed as follows.
A. Capacity Performance in Thermal Noise Limited Scenario
According to Plancks blackbody radiation law, the thermal
noise power
is approximately given by
(19)
is the Boltzmanns constant having value
and
is the system noise temperature measured in Kelvins. By substituting (19) and (18) into (17), the
capacity of a NFC system in a situation where the thermal noise
is the dominant source of noise is expressed entirely as a function of loaded quality factors of the transmitter and receiver as
shown in (20) at the bottom of this page. Hence, one needs to
search through all the possible values of loaded quality factors
in both the transmitter and the receiver for an optimum pair that
maximizes the system capacity given by (20).

(22)

(23)
The first equation in (23) shows that in the case that the transmitter bandwidth limits the system bandwidth, the capacity performance becomes independent of the size and the quality factor
of the receiver antenna.
C. Comparison of Thermal Noise and Natural Interference
The ratio of natural interference to thermal noise in the receiver is obtained by dividing the natural interference noise
picked up by receiver in (21) by the thermal noise power in (19)
(24)

where

The noise temperature of a receiver can vary between 100 and

in gen400 K. Termination efficiency factor
eral varies between 0.5 for high-Q receiver when
and 1 for low-Q receiver when
. The natural interference can be comparable to the thermal noise in power
depending on the size of coil, loaded quality factor, termination efficiency and temperature at receiver. In general, for receivers with low-loaded Q, the thermal noise is comparable or

if
(20)
if

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 5, MAY 2012

Fig. 4. Variation of (a) mutual inductance

and (b) coupling coefficient
with the communication distance in free space.

greater than the received natural interference since a large receiver bandwidth leads to more thermal noise, while for receivers with high-loaded Q, the received natural interference
can be dominant since a higher loaded Q at the receiver intercepts a greater amount of natural interference.
V. SIMULATION RESULTS

Fig. 5. Capacity versus transmitter/receiver Q of the near field link at three

kHz (b) at
kHz.
difference distances (a) at

An inductively coupled NFC air-air link operating at VLF

frequencies is examined in this paper to demonstrate the impact of quality factors to the capacity performance of a weakly
coupled near field communication system. The simulations are
carried out in the following steps. First, the commercial software COMSOL Multiphysics is used to extract the equivalent
, parameters and the coupling coefficient of the coils by
performing quasi-static electromagnetic simulations. One can
calculate the quality factors from the extracted and parameters, which are then substituted into (15) to lead to the received
power versus different distances. Finally, (17) is used to compute the capacity of the link for a certain assumed noise level.
On the other hand, those parameters can also be analytically derived using (1)(3). The capacity performance can thus be calculated in the same fashion for comparison. Due to the axial
symmetry of the coils, the simulation is performed in the two-dimensional space of the wire cross section. In all the simulation
scenarios, two identical circular coils made of copper with loop
radii
m, the wire radius
cm are chosen

as the antennas at the transmitter and receiver. The coils consist

of 50 wound turns and the spacing between two windings next
to each other is at
cm.
Two identical circular coils centered on a single axis and
separated by distance
in free space form a communication
link in the air. The simulation is performed when the coils are
operating at two resonant frequency points,
KHz and
KHz, respectively. The obtained resistance of the two
coils from simulations is
at 1 KHz
and
at 3 KHz. The self-inductance of
the two coils from simulation is
mH at both 1
and 3 KHz. In contrast, the analytic value of the self-inductance
is
mH at both 1 and 3 KHz obtained from (1).
This is because that the uniformity assumption of the magnetic
field inside the solenoids is made for the loops, leading overestimations of self-inductance for loops than the simulated results.
The intrinsic quality factor of the coils from The simulation is

AZAD et al.: LINK BUDGET AND CAPACITY PERFORMANCE OF INDUCTIVELY COUPLED RESONANT LOOPS

2459

a separation distance of
km. The available transmitter
power
varies from 125 to 375 W. The maximum data rates
for different available power level are 720 bps at 375 W, 600 bps
at 250 W, and 440 bps at 125 W. The corresponding transmitter
and receiver Q are at 12, 14, and 16, respectively. A lower available power from the source leads to a lower optimal capacity of
the system and a higher loaded transmitter Q requirement.
VI. CONCLUSIONS

Fig. 6. Effect of the available power from the transmitter on the capacity performance of the near field link.

at 1 KHz and
at 3 KHz.
Fig. 4(a) and (b) show the variations of the simulated mutual
inductance
and coupling coefficient versus the separation
distance between the transmitter and receiver in free space in
the range of 1 to 10 km, in comparison to analytical results obtained from (1)(3). The solid blue curve represents the analytic
value of mutual inductance and coupling coefficient and the asterisk and circle lines are the extracted results from the simulations. The analytic and simulation results of the mutual inductance agree very well within the communication range of 1 to
10 km. The extracted coupling coefficients from simulations
is around 2.5 times of the analytic values due to the discrepancy
between the simulated self-inductance and those derived analytically. Furthermore, the simulation results show that the variation of coupling coefficient between the two coils in free space
is almost independent of their operating frequency and it does
roll off at the rate of inverse cube of communication distance .
The coupling coefficient drops from 3.1e10 to 2.5e13 when
increases from 1 to 10 km.
To generate the capacity versus distance curves, the available
transmitter power
is assumed to be 60 W and the noise temperature of the system is
K. The received power is
calculated with (15) and the noise power is the superposition of
the thermal noise power and natural interference power. Therefore, the capacity versus the transmitter/receiver loaded quality
factor is computed for both
kHz and
kHz and
plotted in Fig. 5(a) and (b) for several choices of distances. Fig. 5
shows there exists an optimal quality factors for each distance
that maximizes the link capacity as the transferred power and
the bandwidth of the link must be traded off. It is observed that
the optimal data rate of the system operating at
kHz is approximately 2.5 times that of the system operating at
kHz.
For example, at
km, the highest data rate at
kHz
is 1900 bps achieved at transmitter and receiver of 5, while,
at
kHz it is only 800 bps achieved at the transmitter and
receiver of 4. Fig. 6 shows the effect of the available power
from source on the capacity performance of the same link with

The near field power transfer equation for inductively coupled resonant loops are derived and validated by experimental
results. It has been demonstrated in the strong coupling case, for
each distance there is an optimum impedance matching condition that maximizes the power transfer efficiency over this distance. In the weak coupling case the received power in the near
field system goes down inversely with the sixth power of distance and a conjugate match to the loss of the coils in both the
transmitter and the receiver maximizes the power transferred
in this case. This paper also presents the theoretical analysis of
the capacity performance of an inductively coupled near field
communication system based on the derived near field power
transfer equation and the information theory. It is concluded
that the capacity is limited respectively by thermal noise for
low-Q receiver and natural interference for high-Q receiver.
The capacity performance of an inductively coupled NFC link
operating at VLF is evaluated. It is observed that higher operating frequency provide greater optimal capacity than that in the
lower frequency in the air but requiring higher transmitter and
receiver Q.
APPENDIX
Derivation for Self and Mutual Inductance of Coils: When
the radius of a coil is much smaller than the wavelength and
its length, one can assume the magnetic field inside the coil is
uniformly distributed (solenoid approximation). The self-inductance of a coil is defined as the ratio of magnetic flux linkage to
the current through the coil [19]
(A-1)
where
is the magnetic flux that arises in an area
enclosed
by current in the conductor
and
is the magnetic flux density at the center of the coil itself. Magnetic flux
density at a point on the axis of the coil that carries the current
is given by [19]
(A-2)
At the center of the coil
(A-3)
Substitute (A-3) and
given by

into (A-1), the inductance

is

(A-4)

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 5, MAY 2012

The mutual inductance

is defined as the ratio of flux
linkage of the circuit 2 to the current in
[19]
(A-5)
where
is the magnetic flux that arises in an area
enclosed
by
due to current
in the conductor
.
,
which can be obtained from (A-2), is the magnetic flux density
at the center of the
. It should be noted that the magnetic
flux density through the area
is assumed to be uniform and
identical to the one at the center in (A-5). This condition may
only be true when either the
is much smaller than
or
the distance is far greater than the radius of the
. Substitute (A-2) and
into (A-5), the mutual inductance
under the assumption of infinitesimal thickness of the coil
and the homogeneity of the magnetic field in the area of
is
given by
(A-6)

Notice (A-6) does not satisfy symmetry in its expression due

to the smaller
assumption made when (A-5) is derived.
Taking consideration of the symmetry between the coils, a more
general form of the mutual inductance between two coils is
yielded as follows:

(A-7)

Fig. 7. Mutual Inductance between two coils calculated using the approximate
expression in the paper and the exact expression in [15].

where
is the magnetic flux density due to ELF/VLF Noise
floor.
is the number of turns and is the cross-section area
of the loop. The received power at a particular frequency is

(A-11)
Total received power due to ELF/VLF interference is obtained
by integrating the received power for all the frequencies within
the bandwidth
(A-12)

For comparisons, the exact expression for coefficient of mutual

inductance given in [15] is
(A-8)
where

In [20] vertical electric and horizontal magnetic flux density is

given in dB in relative to
. In (A-12),
needs to be
integrated over the bandwidth
of the system. The value of
is approximately - for frequencies up to 0.1 MHz.
Hence the received natural noise power is given by
(A-13)

(A-9)
and and are complete elliptic integrals of first and second
kind.
The mutual inductances between two coils having same radius (2 cm) and different radii (2 and 10 cm) aligned along the
same axis are evaluated for distance varying from 2 to 50 cm
using the approximate expression (A-7) and the exact expression (A-8). The results are plotted in Fig. 7, which show good
agreements until the coils are extremely close to each other.
Power Received Due to VLF/ELF Natural Noise: The
voltage
received at the receiver due to ELF/VLF
natural interference at angular frequency can be found using
Maxwells equation

Substituting the area , inductance of the receiver coil

(1), termination factor
(A-13), the received power takes the form

using
in

(A-14)
where
-

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(A-10)

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[2] T. Bieler, M. Perrottet, V. Nguyen, and Y. Perriard, Contactless power

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Umar Azad received the B.E. degree in electrical

engineering from the College of Electrical and
Mechanical Engineering, National University of
Sciences and Technology, Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in
2007, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from
the University of California at Los Angeles in 2010,
and is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in
electromagnetics at the University of California at
Los Angeles.
He has been working in the Digital Microwave
Lab, University of California at Los Angeles, since
January of 2009. His research interests include electrically small antennas,
wireless power transfer, and near-field communication systems

Hengzhen Crystal Jing received the Ph.D. degree

in electrical engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2008.
She is currently the Product Design Engineer at
QuinStar Technology Inc., Torrance, CA, focusing
on design and development of millimeter wave transceivers, antennas. Her research interest in the University of California at Los Angeles was switched resonant antennas for UWB pulse transmission and near
field communication system.

Yuanxun Ethan Wang (S96M99SM10) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from
the University of Science and Technology of China
(USTC), Hefei, China, in 1993, and the M.S. and
Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the
University of Texas at Austin in 1996 and 1999,
respectively.
From 1999 to 2002, he worked as a Research Engineer and Lecturer in the Department of Electrical
Engineering, University of California at Los Angeles
and became an Assistant Professor in November
2002. He is now an Associate Professor. He has worked on radar systems for
more than 15 years and is a Technical Consultant of several local microwave
and radar companies in California. He has published more than 100 journal and
conference papers and graduated 10 Ph.D.s. His research is in the general area
of microwave and radar systems with emphasis on antennas and phased arrays,
high efficiency power amplifiers and transmitters and integrated RF front-ends.
His researches blend the digital processing technologies and concepts into RF
and microwave system design, which often lead to new system architectures
and novel antenna and circuit configurations.