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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, April 16, 2018 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Steven Anlage

"Long Range Wireless Power Transfer – Some New Ideas"

ABSTRACT -- The last frontier for those hoping to "Cut the Cord" is the power cable. Short-range wireless power transfer (WPT) has made great strides towards widespread acceptance in recent years. However, the goal of providing long-range (i.e. room scale) WPT is much more technologically challenging, and may have associated health concerns. After briefly reviewing several approaches to long-range WPT I will present our idea, based on time-reversed electromagnetic wave propagation. Exploiting time-reversal invariance of the lossless wave equation leads to some surprising effects and could enable remarkable new technologies. The forward/backward symmetry of wave propagation is exploited in a device known as a "time-reversal mirror." Such devices actually operate best under conditions where the waves are strongly and randomly scattered, making time-reversed wave propagation of some practical relevance. Notably, the time-reversed waves can be made to collapse in a very brief time interval and in a localized manner in space. I will give an overview of our work with time-reversal mirrors as a new sensor paradigm for detecting changes in complex scattering environments, directed wireless communication, and wireless power transfer.

SPEAKER -- Steven M. Anlage is a Professor of Physics and faculty affiliate of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his B.S. degree in Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology. His graduate work concerned quasicrystals. His post-doctoral work at Stanford University concentrated on high frequency properties of high temperature superconductors. In 1990 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Physics in the Center for Superconductivity Research at the University of Maryland. He is now a Full Professor of Physics. He was the interim Director of the Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials, and is a member of the Maryland NanoCenter. In 2011 he was appointed a Research Professor at the DFG-Center for Functional Nanostructures at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

He has patented a near-field scanning microwave microscope for measurements of electronic materials. Prof. Anlage also performs microwave analog experiments on quantum chaos. As part of this work he has developed a statistical prediction model for effects of high-power microwave signals on electronics. He is also active in the emerging field of time-reversed electromagnetics.

Anlage is a member of the American Physical Society, the IEEE, the Optical Society of America, and the Materials Research Society. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and Department of Defense. He was appointed a University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher in 2016 and won the UMD Invention of the Year Award in 2017.

Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov