The 2012 Pickering Lecture, "The Future of Road Technology", will be presented by Professor John
Boys and Associate Professor Grant Covic of The University of Auckland.

The Pickering public lecture series, which is hosted annually by selected regional IPENZ Branches, aims to stimulate interest in engineering matters in the community.

The free lectures are named in honour of Dr William Pickering (1910–2004), a Wellington-born engineer and scientist who was a leading light in the United States space programme.

Inductive Power Transfer Technology

Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) is world changing technology. With IPT electrical power can be delivered, without electrical contact, to stationary or moving loads.

While scientists and engineers experimented with and theorised about IPT for many decades, it took the innovation and determination of a team at the University of Auckland to turn potential into reality.

Join Professor John Boys and Associate Professor Grant Covic and hear their remarkable story.

To learn about Inductive Power Transfer Technology in action visit the University of Auckland Power Electronics Page
http://web.ece.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/powerelectronicsresearch#s2c2

HaloIPT

Professor Boys and Associate Professor Covic co-founded Halo IPT in 2010. The company was founded on the basis of the groundbreaking IPT research undertaken at the University of Auckland.

HaloIPT was the first company in the world to commercialise wireless charging technology, allowing vehicles to charge automatically simply by parking over a transmitter pad in the ground.

HaloIPT won the CleanEquity Monaco 2011 Award for Excellence in the Field of Environmental Technology Research, selected from over 400 cleantech companies from across the cleantech sector.

From  inception Halo IPT attracted international interested, in 2011 the company was purchased by American wireless technology leader Qualcomm.

For more information visit the Qualcomm website

Professor John Boys DistFIPENZ

John Boys received his Master of Engineering degree from The University of Auckland in 1965. After completing his PhD he worked at SPS Technologies for five years before returning to academia as a lecturer at the University of Canterbury. He moved to Auckland in 1977 where he developed his work in power electronics. He is Professor of Electronics at The University of Auckland in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and is a co-founder of HaloIPT.

He has published more than 100 papers in international journals and holds more than 20 US patents from which licenses in specialised application areas have been granted around the world. His specialist research areas are power electronics and inductive power transfer, and with Associate Professor Grant Covic he jointly heads power electronics research at The University of Auckland. John is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and a Distinguished Fellow of IPENZ.

Associate Professor Grant Covic SMIEEE

Grant Covic has a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) and PhD degrees in electrical and electronic engineering from The University of Auckland, and is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He and Professor John Boys co-founded HaloIPT in 2010.

His research and consulting interests include power electronics, electric vehicle battery charging and inductive (contact-less) power transfer, areas in which he has published more than 100 refereed papers in international journals and at international conferences. He holds a number of US patents (with many more pending) from which licenses in specialised application areas of inductive power transfer have been granted around the world.

Grant received the Arthur Mead Award for the Environment and Sustainability from the IPENZ Auckland Branch in 1994 and 1999 for engineering designs, the IEE John Hopkinson Premium Award in 1999 for best technical paper, and the award for best research paper at the 2011 IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applications. In 2012 he was awarded The University of Auckland's Vice Chancellor's Commercialisation Medal for world-leading, commercially successful research.