A team of students from National Taiwan University of Science and Technology claimed the grand prize at this year’s International Future Energy Challenge in Michigan for a high-efficiency wireless charging system for electric vehicles, the school said yesterday.
The young mechanics prevailed in the final stage of the competition held by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which concluded last week, beating eight other teams from around the world.
Team leader Chen Ming-cheng (陳明正), a doctoral student, said his team won the top prize because their design beat the evaluation panel’s expectations.
Extra efforts by the team included a design known as the power factor correction universal input, which allows for universal application of the charging device by overcoming voltage differences in electricity supplied in different regions, Chen said.
The feature also ensures that the phase of an external power source is aligned with the phase of electricity the device generates, thereby boosting a device’s energy efficiency, he said.
Another feature that earned them a “bonus” was constant current and constant voltage design, which protects the charging device from going haywire, he said.
The wireless charging device generates electricity by equalizing the frequencies emitted by ferromagnetic coils installed in a car battery and an external power supply, thereby achieving resonance, which enables transmissions of electromagnetic waves from the power supply to the battery, Chen said.
During the final stage of the competition, contestants were asked to set up their devices and ensure their steady performance for 90 minutes.
That was not an easy task, he said, as finalists must overcome any technical difficulties caused by parts damaged during long-distance transportation.
The participants were graded based on the weight, size and cost-efficiency of their devices, as well as their presentations, he said.
Chen said that the judges put a lot of emphasis on presentation, which was assigned a weighting of 15 percent, adding that he had rarely seen presentation skills given such a high degree of importance in the Taiwanese education system.
He called on Taiwanese students to develop strong presentation skills, a quality he said many Taiwanese teachers neglect.
Among the other finalists, Chen said a team from Kunming University of Science and Technology in China impressed him the most.
“Even though we managed to outperform them, I could feel the gap between Taiwanese and Chinese students has become much smaller compared with last year’s competition,” he said. “Chinese students are very aggressive and inquisitive, and I think Taiwanese students can learn to show these qualities.”
He said his team’s accomplishment was the result of two years’ preparation and hard work, having survived a stringent vetting process in which many participants were eliminated by the organizers.
Chen said his team first submitted a proposal on the project in 2013 and underwent a lengthy appraisal that ended in March.
He said that he and his team would apply for a patent for the device in Taiwan, then in China and the US.
The device would be ready to market once it has passed the requisite safety inspections, he said.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was wooing leaders from across Africa with a banquet on Wednesday night, King Mswati III of Eswatini was notably absent. That is because the kingdom — about the size of New Jersey and with just 1.2 million people — is one of Taiwan’s remaining dozen diplomatic allies. That means Eswatini does not participate in Xi’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the centerpiece of China’s diplomatic outreach to Africa, which was held in Beijing this week. The landlocked nation, which sits between Mozambique and South Africa, is the last holdout in Beijing’s seven-plus decade mission to make Africa
RSS