Bidirectional Power Packet Transmission Using an Inductive Energy Buffer

Abstract

The typical common-bus structure and its inherent bus stabilization requirement can become a bottleneck for flexibility in power supplies for battery-powered autonomous systems, limiting scalability and plug-and-play capability. Power packetization overcomes this by eliminating the common bus through time-division multiplexing of physically isolated power flows. However, conventional power packet routers face two physical-layer limitations: uncontrollable transmission direction and limited controllability of the amount of energy per packet. This paper proposes a fully controllable bidirectional power packet transmission to address these limitations. We introduce an inter-router circuit featuring a parallel inductor as a temporary energy buffer, enabling power transmission in any direction with full control over the transferred energy. We derive the switching algorithm for the routers to perform this operation and verify its feasibility through experiments using prototype hardware.