Prof. Alessandra Costanzo of Università di Bologna, Italy,

In the next future we will be surrounded in our daily lives by a multitude of small, relatively inexpensive computing devices, equipped with wireless communication and sensing featuring the concept of “pervasive intelligence”, a basis from which we can envision our future world as an Internet of Everything (IoT/IoE), in terms of both a consumer IoT/IoE and the Industrial IoT. With this scenario in mind, one of the main challenging task is the wireless powering of a multitude of ubiquitous devices and machines to allow truly perpetual wireless-powered communication (WPC). This webinar first describes possible solutions for the RF architectures of transmitting and receiving sides for battery-less scenarios, showing how multi-domain design techniques, combining EM theory and numerical simulation with nonlinear circuit design can provide reliable system implementations; secondly, the effective exploitation of such systems is shown through some significant applications, such as high precision localization (centimeter-level ) and tracking, adopting UWB communication, and predictive maintenance in machinery and industrial plants scenarios exploiting low-energy communications. The design challenges for both the transmitting and receiving subsystems are presented together with the performance achievements in real scenarios.

Biography:

Alessandra Costanzo is full Professor at Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna, Italy, since 2018 where she leads the RF and wireless lab. She is currently involved in research activities dedicated to design entire wireless power transmission systems, based on the combination of EM and nonlinear numerical techniques, adopting both far-field and near-field solutions, for several power levels and operating frequencies. She has played a key role in creating the bridge between system-level and circuit-level analysis techniques of RF/microwave wireless links. She has developed simulation techniques capable of treating, in an integrated and efficient way, nonlinear (NL) components, such as transistors, and electromagnetic entities, such as an antenna or other radiators. She has accomplished this goal by means of a general-purpose approach combining electromagnetic (EM) theory, EM simulation inside the nonlinear circuit analysis. She is currently the PI of many research and industrial international projects at microwave and millimeter-wave, dedicated to Industrial IoT, and smart and safe mobility. She has authored more than 260 scientific publications on peer-reviewed international journals and conferences and several chapter books. She owns four international patents. She is co-founder of the EU COST action IC1301 WiPE “Wireless power transfer for sustainable electronics”, where she chaired WG1: “far-field wireless power transfer”. She was workshop chair of the EuMW2014, TPC co-chair of IEEE IMARC 2018, and IEEE WPTC 2019. She is the past-chair (2016-2017) of the MTT-26 committee on wireless energy transfer and conversion and a member of the MTT-24 committee on RFID. She is past Associate Editor of the IEEE Transaction on MTT, and Associate Editor of the Cambridge International Journal of Microwave and of Wireless Technologies and of the Cambridge International Journal of WPT. Since 2016 she is Steering Committee Chair of the new IEEE Journal of RFID. She is a MTT-S representative and Distinguished Lecturer of the CRFID, where she also serves as MTT-S representative. She was Chair of EUMC2020 and is an IEEE Senior Member.

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