ProfessorPaul Mitcheson

My research concerns electrical energy conversion, with a focus to the provision of power in hard to reach places, such as portable devices (where recharging batteries through charging cables is either inconvenient or impossible), medical implants and wireless sensors. The technologies involved in this work include energy harvesting systems, battery diagnosis, wireless power transfer and power electronics.

During my PhD, and in the early part of my reseach career as a member of academic staff, my work concentrated on energy harvesting devices for producing self-powered systems powered by ambient vibration. These systems, which are comparable to MEMS implementations of generators in self-winding watches, are generally used in conjunction with miniature batteries to extend the useable deployment lifetime of wireless sensor networks, which have use in monitoring machinery, structures and transport applications.

In the last decade, I have been working on wireless power delivery, including harvesting RF energy from the ambient and delivery of power using the magnetic near field usinginductive coupling.  Our work has focussed on multi-MHz operation of such systems, including inverters, rectifiers and the magnetic link.  This has led to the formatoin of the spinout Bumblebee Poewr Ltd.