Work · NASA MINDS competition
Wireless Power and Data Transfer
NASA MINDS 2024 - Honorable Mention
Paired resonant Tesla coils beaming power and low-frequency data across a gap with no conductor between them, and the electromagnetic compatibility engineering needed to keep nearby avionics alive.
The problem
Transferring useful power without a connector means kilovolt-level near-fields. The hard part is not generating them, it is operating sensitive avionics and sensors a few centimeters away without corrupting or destroying them.
What I did
Tuned coil pairs into resonance to make transfer efficient at a usable range, and modulated the same link to carry low-frequency data.
Treated EMC as a first-class design problem: Faraday cages, mu-metal shielding and opto-isolated I/O to break ground paths, rather than shielding as an afterthought.
Validated with oscilloscope and VNA field testing instead of relying on simulation.
Result
Power and data transfer over short-to-medium range with avionics operating reliably inside the near-field. Honorable Mention at NASA MINDS 2024.
From the report
Bench photographs and measured data from the project's own report.