Metamaterial hails efficient wireless power transfer

By using metasurfaces rather than antennas, scientists created an electromagnetic energy collector that can achieve full absorption of waves.

A research team at the University of Waterloo in Canada used metamaterials to produce an electromagnetic energy collector that neither reflects nor transmits power enabling full absorption of incident waves.

“More than 80% of our energy today comes from burning fossil fuels, which is both harmful to our environment and unsustainable as well. In our group, we’re trying to help solve the energy crisis by improving the efficiency of electromagnetic energy-harvesting systems,” said PhD student Thamer Almoneef.

In the study, published in Applied Physics Letters, the scientists used metasurfaces rather than the classical antennas to achieve full absorption. To form these metasurfaces the team etched the surface of a material with periodic shapes and created particular dimensions and tuned the proximity of each shape. This provided full absorption of waves that was then converted to energy.

Professor Omar Ramahi at the University of Waterloo said: “Now, our technology introduces ‘metasurfaces’ that are much better energy collectors than classical antennas. Conventional antennas can channel electromagnetic energy to much lower energy absorption efficiency levels.”

The team is hoping that the new design could be applied in space solar power and wireless power transfer that is directly adaptable to power remote devices.

Next, the researchers are planning to extend the technology to the infrared and visible spectra. “We’ve already extended our work into the infrared frequency regime and we hope to report very soon about near-unity absorption in those higher-frequency regimes,” said Professor Ramahi.

Paper: http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/apl/106/15/10.1063/1.4916232