António Abreu, a PhD Student at the MIT Portugal Program who works at LNEG (Laboratório Nacional de Energia e Geologia I.P.), has been developing a wireless charging system for implantable medical devices. Though inductive transfer or power is nothing new, doing it at high energy levels is difficult without frying the receiving device or tissue around it.
In the last few years work has proceeded to refine the system so that it would be capable of delivering enough energy to power devices beyond traditional pacemakers.
From MIT Portugal:
The present innovation takes into account the Energy Efficiency in electric transmission systems without ferromagnetic cores, regarding medical application. In practice it eliminates the Gibbs phenomena.
The invention optimizes the energy flow determined by the regime of exploration previewed at the innovative Predictor-Corrector Abacus conception.
The Predictor-Corrector Abacus is a representation in the complex plan of a situation where a specific load is supplied by an electrical energy to the Active Power P, and Reactive Power Q. What characterizes this Abacus is the circumstance of considering the effect of the reactance and the resistance of longitudinal transmission lines that is evident at the figure by the position of the angles of segments lines that proliferate in the first and second quadrants of the Argand’s complex plan. The best position of the segments lines defines the maximum of power transference without electromagnetic interferences.
The Prototype, patented by António Abreu in the USA and in Europe with the collaboration and support of the PRIME (Incentive Program for the Modernization of the Economy) program and approved by the European Commission, was initially designed for pacemakers application but currently, and according to the medical development, new improved technics were made to be suitable for high power (and high voltages too) devices, such defibrillators, electric heart, insulin pumps or other type of implantable prosthesis.
More from MIT Portugal: A Portuguese fast transcutaneous non-invasive battery recharger and energy feeder for electronic implants…
