Wireless Power Transmission System for High-Throughput Behavioral Studies on Small Freely Moving Animal Subjects

项目摘要 在对小型自由活动动物的行为神经学实验中，如啮齿类动物、无线笼子系统 已被广泛用于实现可穿戴/可植入设备(WID)的无线和无电池操作 附着在动物身上或植入动物体内的。通常情况下，神经科学实验需要延长运行时间。 在足够大的受试者群体中的时间段，以提高实验的质量和统计有效性 结果。研究人员需要将动物从故乡转移到实验场，一次转移一只， 并在实验结束后将动物送回收容所，并最终送回动物设施。这 这一过程对研究人员来说是相当劳动密集型和低效的，对动物来说压力很大，而且成本很高。我们有 开发了一种可机架安装的无线笼式系统，称为EHC系统。EHC系统是一种基于共振的 多线圈感应连接系统建立在一个标准大小的啮齿动物家园。同时运行 多个EHC系统可以提高每个实验区段的数据吞吐量。然而，挑战在于 这样做是因为相邻的EHC系统之间的严重交叉耦合，这将改变系统的运行 参数，特别是发射机的谐振频率，并恶化功率传输效率 电感链接。当放置相邻的归属时，感应链路甚至进入分频区域 比某个阈值更接近的。而分裂的共振频率不能通过调谐 谐振电容。为了应对这一挑战，我们提出了一个多EHC系统，以增强 在标准机架中紧挨着放置的EHC单元阵列通过添加 在相邻EHC单元之间安装谐振无功屏蔽线圈，并实现三环自动调谐 每个EHC单元用于高通量实验。屏蔽线圈将减少不需要的相互耦合 在相邻的EHC单元之间达到一定的阈值，三环自动调节技术可以调整每个 EHC单元在连续和较长时间内处于最佳无线功率传输状态 最大限度地减少操作员参与。

Project Summary In behavioral neuroscience experiments on small freely moving animals, such as rodents, wireless cage systems have been widely used to enable wireless and battery-free operation of wearable/implantable devices (WIDs) attached to or implanted in the animal body. Typically, the neuroscience experiments need to run for extended periods in large enough subject populations to enhance the quality and statistical validity of the experiment results. Researchers need to transfer animals from their homecage to the experimental arena, one at a time, and return the animals back to the homecage and eventually to the animal facility after the experiments. This procedure is quite labor-intensive and inefficient for researchers, stressful for the animals, and costly. We have developed a rack-mountable wireless cage system, called EHC system. The EHC system is a resonance-based multi-coil inductive link system built around a standard-sized rodent homecage. Simultaneously operating multiple EHC systems can increase the data throughput in each experiment section. However, the challenge to do this is the severe cross-couplings among adjacent EHC systems, which would shift the system operating parameters, particularly the transmitter resonance frequency, and deteriorate the power transfer efficiency of the inductive link. The inductive link even enters the frequency-splitting zone when adjacent homecages are placed closer than a certain threshold. And the splitted resonance frequency cannot be converged by tuning the resonance capacitance. To address this challenge, we propose a multi-EHC system to empower the simultaneous operation of an array of EHC units placed right next to each other in the standard rack by adding resonant reactive shielding coils in between the adjacent EHC units and implementing triple-loop auto-tuning in each EHC unit for high throughput experiments. The shielding coil will reduce the undesired mutual coupling between adjacent EHC units to a certain threshold that the triple-loop auto-tuning technique can adjust each EHC unit at its optimal wireless power transmission condition on a continuous basis and over an extended period with minimal operator involvement.