Cutting the Cord

By Tad Vezner

What kinds of things benefit from advances in high-frequency, high-power electrical systems?

“Anything and everything,” Omer Onar (Ph.D. EE ’10) says.

If that is so, Onar’s at the top of a field that’s helping everything in the world—at least everything that a modern consumer might desire. He’s dedicated his career to making it easier for power to reach products—from vehicles to cell phones—at a high speed, efficiently, and without physical connections.

And his argument gets easier to accept when you see what he’s done as the leader of the team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that is figuring out how to power electric vehicles, wirelessly, in a way that will allow them to charge at a rate that’s competitive with the minutes it takes to fill a tank of gas. That means taking a product and placing it up to a gas station and putting fuel in their car in less than 10minutes,” says Larry Seiber, a technical professional on Onar’s team who has worked with him for more than a decade. “In 2016 we were working together in the lab and able to achieve 20 kilowatts, and that was a record at the time, too. We go through the years with these designs, and Omer’s leading a lot of this research. The success here has a very bright future.”

The higher the frequency, the faster a user can charge something up. And lower-frequency wireless chargers are also historically inefficient, with nearly 20 percent of the energy being lost in the transfer. Onar’s research has helped boost that efficiency to only a 5 percent loss. Other boosts include the optimal distance allowable between the charger pad and the receiver, which has crept from a potential maximum of a few inches to 10 inches, with the exact placement of those components allowed to be “misaligned,” or out of place, by up to four inches without any loss in efficiency.

But at peak power flow, that 270-kilowatt boost equates to charging a mid-sized electric sedan from 10 percent to 80 percent in 20 minutes, or adding a 50 percent charge to a largely depleted vehicle in only 10 minutes. That’s similar to some of the fastest wired DC chargers available now.

Future applications include the possibility of installing chargers in roadways to power vehicles as they pass over them.

But why stop at cars? Onar asks. From phones to home appliances and to drones to industrial robots, “It’s really the [advances in] high-frequency that’s enabling a lot of innovations in the technology, and we are seeing the effects in our daily lives,” Onar says. “That could also be an enabler for space applications, defense applications, computer microprocessor applications. Eliminating cables and freeing up the devices from cords and plugs can provide a lot of benefits in a number of different applications.”

“Omer has a unique ability to look at evidence or symptoms that we see, the data that we are getting, and recognize a solution pretty quickly,” Seiber says.

Born and raised in Turkey, Onar always wanted to be a scientist, a desire that came from watching space-based science fiction movies. While he was a student at Illinois Institute of Technology, he researched a broad range of projects for various governmental agencies, ranging from the United States Department of Defense to the U.S. Department of Energy. While he was attending the Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition in 2009, he ran into representatives from Oak Ridge, who were impressed by his prolific publishing rate: he had about 10 papers in science journals, and another dozen conference publications. That led to a position at Oak Ridge, where he worked initially in the national laboratory’s power and energy systems group before being recruited to work in power electronics and electric machinery, where he has remained for more than a decade.

Onar doesn’t see himself branching into anything different soon. The technology, he says, can help in the advancement of countless human endeavors. In the future, he also envisions researching how to harvest energy from electromagnetic fields, even vibrations.

“Energy from a lot of different sources can be harvested,” Onar says, again repeating, “Anything and everything, they are significantly benefiting from improvements in high-frequency, high-power systems.”