Energy Seminar: Dynamic Wireless Charging of Electric Vehicles - Khurram Afridi, Cornell University

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 Afridi's 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 wireless charging of electric vehicles.

Speaker bio:

Khurram Afridi is an Associate Professor of ECE at Cornell. 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 power electronics and energy systems incorporating power electronic controls. His experience includes positions at CU Boulder, MIT, LUMS, Techlogix, Schlumberger, Philips, Lutron, and JPL. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Transportation Electrification and the IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics, and was the Technical Program Committee chair for the IEEE Wireless Power Transfer Conference 2015. He has received Caltech’s Carnation Merit Award, the BMW Scientific Award, the LUMS Werner-von-Siemens Chair, and the NSF CAREER Award. He is co-author of five IEEE prize papers.

Admission Info

Free and open to all.

Related Reading

K.K. Afridi, “Wireless Charging of Electric Vehicles,” The Bridge, National Academy of Engineering, vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 17-22, Winter 2017.

S. Sinha and K.K. Afridi, "Closed-loop Control of a Dynamic Capacitive Wireless Power Transfer System," Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics (COMPEL), Toronto, Canada, June 2019.

https://energy.stanford.edu/energy-seminar/upcoming-energy-seminars