Team:ZJU-China/Hardware/MediumWave
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Medium Wave
Overview
We want to transmit the signal to our Trichoderma atroviride directly by electromagnetic wave. So we need to produce a high-powered signal generator, to transmit our signals to T.atroviride remotely, which works as a “speaker”. In addition, it can be loaded on a UAV for large area use. For more information about our medium wave transduction, please click to see more.
Our efforts
Theoretically the frequency of the signal generator should be around 465kHZ[1], and the power should be large enough. We first purchased an wave generator. But we didn’t have team members major in electrical engineering, we could not make suitable amplifiers. So its power was not enough, our experiment failed.
Fig.1 The signal generator we purchased.
Then, we tried to make a Tesla coil, which is a kind of series resonant transformer, and can produce alternating magnetic field. We purchased the relative components from the Internet and assembled them.
We found that its power was sufficient, and even could light up a light bulb remotely.
Fig.2 The Tesla coil we made. It can even light up a light bulb.
But sadly, the heat effect of device was too significant that it could directly heat the whole medium even without Ferritin. Given more time, we would optimize this device and test our TRPV1-Ferritin system.
Future Work
In the future, we will work with some professional experts and make better devices with smaller heating effect to test our medium wave transduction method. If the electromagnetic wave fails, we may try to use ultrasonic wave to combined with TRPC vibration-sensitive calcium channel to achieve remote control.
Reference
[1] Stanley S A, Gagner J E, Damanpour S, et al. Radio-Wave Heating of Iron Oxide Nanoparticles Can Regulate Plasma Glucose in Mice[J]. Science, 2012, 336(6081):604-8.
