Wireless Power Laboratory harvests awards

Two PhD students from the department's Wireless Power Laboratory have been recognised with awards at IEEE conferences.

The first award, for best student paper, was presented to George Kkelis at the IEEE Wireless Power Transfer Conference in Boulder, Colorado, and focused on comparing different high frequency rectifier topologies.

The second award, to Chris Kwan, was for best paper at the IEEE Power Electronics Society Workshop on Wireless Power (IEEE WOW) where an overview paper on the design methods used in the group was presented.

Leading the charge: (from left) George Kkelis, Sam Aldhaher, Paul Mitcheson, James Lawson, Dave Yates and Chris Kwan

The Wireless Power Lab develops fundamental research to enable devices to be charged or powered at a distance without the need of a power cord or a battery. Energy harvesting, and more recently inductive wireless power transfer - a method of transferring electrical power over a magnetic link -is used to energise devices, for example, electric vehicles and consumer electronics.

Highly efficient and very light weight systems are achieved by operating the power electronics at multi-MHz using soft-switching. The group’s research is particularly focused on applications at the 10s to 100s of watts level, so it has especially useful applications to medical implants such as heart pumps.

This wireless power transfer system can put approx 200W over an air gap of 10-30cm.

Dr Paul Mitcheson, director of the lab, said “I’m very proud of what we have achieved recently. It is particularly satisfying that every current member of the group was a co-author of the IEEE WOW paper and it’s nice to be recognised for our efforts.”

The work is funded from a mixture of sources including EPSRC, Drayson Technologies, the UK government and EDF Energy.