An RF-Ultrasound Relay for Adaptive Wireless Powering Across Tissue Interfaces.

Single modality wireless power transfer has limited depth for mm-sized implants across air / tissue or skull / tissue interfaces because they either suffer from high loss in tissue (RF, Optical) or high reflection at the medium interface (Ultrasound (US)). This paper proposes an RF-US relay chip at the media interface avoiding the reflection at the boundary, and enabling efficient wireless powering to mm-sized deep implants across multiple media. The relay chip rectifies the incoming RF power through an 85.5% efficient RF inductive link (across air) using a multi-output regulating rectifier (MORR) with 81% power conversion efficiency (PCE) at 186 mW load, and transmits ultrasound using adiabatic power amplifiers (PAs) to the implant in order to minimize cascaded power loss. To adapt the US focus to implant movement or placement, beamforming was implemented using 6 channels of US PAs with 2-bit phase control (0, 90, 180, and 270°) and 3 different amplitudes (6-29, 4.5, and 1.8 V) from the MORR. The adiabatic PA contributes a 30-40% increase in efficiency over class-D and beamforming increases the efficiency by 251% at 2.5 cm over fixed focusing. The proof-of-concept powering system for a retinal implant, from an external PA on a pair of glasses to a hydrophone with 1.2 cm (air) + 2.9 cm (agar eyeball phantom in mineral oil) separation distance, had a power delivered to the load (PDL) of 946 µW. The 2.3 × 2 mm2 relay chip was fabricated in a 180 nm high-voltage (HV) BCD process.

Distributed generation adverse impact on the distribution networks protection and its mitigation.

Integration of Distributed Generation (DG) generates problems for the protection of Distribution Networks (DNs) in power systems. When DG is integrated into a power distribution system (DS), the radial nature of the network is altered and the power starts to flow in a reverse direction. In addition to the reverse flow of power, the DG upsurges the fault current level and affects the existing time intermission coordination of the protective overcurrent relay. This study proposes a reverse power relay (RPR) and Fault Current Limiter (FCL) to mitigate the fault current level and reverse power flow in a Distribution Network (DN) by the use of DG. The FCL works only as a unidirectional fault current limiter (UFCL) by restricting the flow of fault current that occurs in the main grid (MG) of the DG. However, FCLs can protect the flow of fault currents from the MG by affecting the operational flexibility and reliability of the DG. To overcome the flow of fault current of the DG, this study proposes RPR to monitor the power flow to the DG. Collectively the study focuses on the protection of radial DS by using RPR and UFCL. The analysis and the modeling were conducted on the 15KV DN of the radial feeder in Debre Markos DN. The 3Φ fault analysis (which is more severe than others) was performed to validate the protection capability of the mitigation techniques which were proposed in this study.