Remarks at the Dynamic Wireless Power Demonstration Day
Indiana Dept. of Transportation (INDOT) 2319 U.S. 231
Friday, August 28
Good morning, everyone. I’m Mark Lundstrom, Dean of Engineering, and on behalf of the College, welcome to today’s demonstration.
I’ve been a faculty member here at Purdue for a long time, and from time to time I’m asked to step in as dean. Mitch Daniels, who is now serving as Purdue’s interim president, describes himself as “Purdue University’s spare tire.” I guess that makes me Purdue Engineering’s spare tire.
Since stepping back into this role on June 1, I’ve been getting reacquainted with everything happening across the College. And this project is one of the most interesting—and potentially important—things we’re doing.
We’re proud of the fact that Purdue Engineering is now the nation’s largest producers of BS, MS, and PhD engineers, but we’re also pioneering a different model of research—one that takes fundamental research all the way to real-world demonstration. What you are going to see today is an example of that.
This work began in 2018 as a Purdue-INDOT research project. It received a major boost in 2020 when NSF established the ASPIRE Engineering Research Center, with Purdue as one of its founding universities. (ASPIRE stands for Advancing Self-Sufficiency through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification.) Today ASPIRE brings together 10 universities and more than 70 government and industry partners.
And that partnership has produced what we’ll be seeing this morning.
What you are going to see today is an electric truck being charged wirelessly—not while it is parked, but while it is traveling at highway speed.
Last year, this system set a world record, delivering an average of about 170 kilowatts to a vehicle traveling at highway speed. Today, you will see the next step: the same roadway delivering power to two different classes of vehicles—a heavy-duty Cummins truck and a medium-duty test vehicle. (And thank you Cummins for providing the vehicle.)
That is an impressive technological accomplishment. But there is something even more important about what we are seeing here.
This is what can happen when a university, government, and industry work together from the beginning. Purdue faculty and students working across disciplines doing fundamental research, INDOT provides the opportunity to test it in the real world. Industry bringing the expertise and resources needed to turn research into practical technology.
Instead of stopping with a paper or a laboratory prototype, this partnership is taking an idea all the way to a working system on an Indiana highway.
That is a model of research and innovation that I believe we are going to need much more of in this country. There’s much talk in Washington now about how critical advanced technologies are to the nation’s security and economic prosperity and the importance of accelerating the pace of innovation, and this project is an example of how to do that.
So, thank you to NSF and the ASPIRE Center, to INDOT, to Cummins, to P.C. Krause and Associates, and especially to the faculty and students who have done the work.
Thank you all for doing the work that made today’s demonstration possible.