Dynamic Wireless Charging of Electric Vehicles

Road transportation, which accounts for 22 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, is undergoing a major transformation with the advent of ridesharing, autonomous driving, and vehicle electrification. Collectively these technologies, in conjunction with renewable sources of electricity, have the potential to dramatically reduce the negative impact of road transportation on the health of the planet. The successful convergence of these technologies will require electric vehicles that are low cost and fully autonomous. These attributes can be realized through dynamic wireless charging. However, this will require wireless charging technology that is well beyond current capabilities, and opens new areas of research related to power and transportation infrastructure. Using examples from my group’s research on capacitive wireless charging (as opposed to the more common inductive techniques), which leverage very high frequency power electronics, this talk will highlight the opportunities and challenges in dynamic capacitive wireless charging of electric vehicles.

Khurram Afridi is an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. He received the BS degree in electrical engineering from Caltech, and SM and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. His research interests are in high frequency power electronics. His experience includes positions at CU Boulder, MIT, LUMS, Techlogix, Schlumberger, Philips, Lutron, and NASA/JPL. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics, and a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Vehicular Technology Society. He has received Caltech’s Carnation Merit Award, BMW Scientific Award, LUMS Werner-von-Siemens Chair, Cornell Engineering Research Excellence Award, Michael Tien ’72 Excellence in Teaching Award and NSF CAREER Award. He holds twenty-two US patents and is co-author of eight IEEE prize papers.