URISE is a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) that gathered college students all across the United States that are interested in doing research, more specifically in a topic related to sustainable energy. Based in the University of Michigan-Dearborn, my research partner, Bethany Foulkes from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and I worked alongside Professor Samir Rawashdeh to research the effects of wireless charging coil misalignment for electric vehicles charging systems. I not only had the experience of reading research papers and becoming more well-rounded on the topic, but we also designed an experiment that measured the effects of misalignment and distance between charging coils.  

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​In 3 weeks, I was able to become familiar with the topic by reading academic papers from schools and research labs, like Oak Ridge Laboratory. We learned that the topic of creating this technology to work in the real world would be tricky. The problem is the durability of the coils in the real world, how critical z alignment is for efficient power transfer, the variability of car height off the ground, minimum target efficiency posed by SAE standards, safety protocols proposed by SAE, and creating a system for the receiving coil to detect the transmitting coil. We found proposed solutions included changing the coil design for more efficient power transfer, using multiple coils to detect in 3D space where each coil is, or using resonance charging to increase the misalignment tolerance compared to regular charging.  

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In addition, the experiments we conducted on with our test set up showed that misalignment plays a critical issue, and similar to our research the z gap misalignment is even more crucial for better power transfer. We summarized the pros and cons of this problem in our poster and presentation slide show, as well as our experimental setup/results.