cww.blog!

I met with the graduate student with whom I will be working on Ph.D. research today. His interests currently lay in the realm of magnetic power transfer, which seems like a good first step toward the remote powering of nano- and micro-scale devices. I guess you have to start somewhere, right?

People have been trying to make wireless power transfer work in significant quantities since about the turn of the 20th century. Perhaps you've heard of Heinrich Hertz, Nikola Tesla, or Hidetsugu Yagi? These three visionaries spent a lot of time working on moving electricity from one place to another, and they never really succeeded on any sort of large scale.

However, it is entirely possible to move reasonable amounts of power from one place to another on a small scale. Sometimes, people "plant" fluorescent tube lights under power lines for artistic purposes, and they light up brilliantly. Nikola Tesla even powered a similar light from 25 miles away.

We're talking about doing it on an even smaller scale. For medical technology, this would work by having a device external to the body that generates a magnetic field. Then, by means of magnetic induction, the power is transferred to the device inside the body. This sounds lovely and wonderful, but there are some problems. For example, Steve (the other graduate student) says this method has about a 0.1% efficiency. That is, for every 1 tesla (of magnetic flux density) transmitted, only 0.001 tesla is received, and the rest dissipates. This is only one of the problems currently facing the research, but what good is research if there are no problems to overcome?

Anyway, I'm looking forward to working on this project, and it will be nice to actually do some experimental stuff, instead of having my head in books all day.