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The inductors along with capacitors and resistors, inductors are one of the three passive elements that are the foundations of all electronics. An inductor works by inducing a magnetic field as an electric current flows through its coil of wire. This magnetic field temporarily stores electric energy as magnetic energy, creating a voltage across the inductor. The strength of the magnetic field or the inductance of the inductor is dependent on a variety of properties such as the number of coils in the wire, the cross-sectional area of the inductor, and the type of material the inductor’s core is made out of.
Inductors are used extensively with capacitors and resistors to create filters for analog circuits and in signal processing. Inductors sense magnetic fields or the presence of magnetically permeable material from a distance. Inductive sensors lie at the heart of nearly every intersection with a traffic light that detect the amount of traffic and adjusts the signal accordingly. Combining inductors that have a shared magnetic path forms a transformer which is a fundamental component of national electrical grids and found in many power supplies as well to increase or decrease voltages to the desired level. Inductive motors leverage the magnetic force applied to inductors to turn electrical energy into mechanical energy.
While simple filters can be made of a few very small resistors, capacitors, and inductors, more stages and poles can be achieved using more complex structures. But while resistors have been miniaturized with, for example, the development of the surface mount resistor, and capacitors have given way to supercapacitor materials that approach the theoretical limit, the basic design of inductors has remained the same throughout the centuries. ICs do not make the best filters. The typical inductor Q that can be fabricated using CMOS process technology is less than 10. With copper and metallization techniques, this can be doubled to around 20. The problem is that to minimize insertion loss, Q values in the hundreds are needed. Presently, only discrete filters can do this.
With connected devices and the Internet of Things poised to become a multi-trillion dollar enterprise by the mid-2020s, Next-generation communications, energy storage, and sensing technologies could be smaller, lighter, and faster than ever. As well as applications in sensors and energy transfer, inductors are key to the RFICs and RFIDs used in the Internet of Things. Radio frequency (RF) electronic components use a lot of passive components, like capacitors and inductors, until recently inductor could not be miniaturized as fast as transistors and digital electronics circuits. Researchers have been exploring various techniques for miniaturizing the inductors.
In 2019, Haoran Wang & Huai Wang of Denmark developed proposed a two-terminal active inductor implemented by power switches and energy storage elements to breakthrough the limitation of the commonly used passive inductor. It has the same level of convenience in use as passive inductors and could have the same impedance characteristic in the frequency of interest.
In 2018n researchers developed a nanomaterial based inductor Industry has been hoping for. Researchers took advantage of another approach, a phenomenon known as kinetic inductance, where instead of a changing magnetic field inducing an opposing current as in magnetic inductance, it’s the inertia of the particles that carry the electric current themselves — such as electrons — that oppose a change in their motion. Functionally, it’s indistinguishable from magnetic inductance, it’s just that kinetic inductance has only ever been practically large under extreme conditions: either in superconductors or in extremely high-frequency circuits.
While magnetic inductance relies on device geometry, kinetic inductance is purely a material property that makes higher inductance densities possible. In conventional metallic conductors, kinetic inductance is negligible, and so it’s never been applied in conventional circuits before. But if it could be applied, it would be a revolutionary advance for miniaturization, since unlike magnetic inductance, its value doesn’t depend on the inductor’s surface area. With that fundamental limitation removed, it could be possible to create a kinetic inductor that’s far smaller than any magnetic inductor we’ve ever made. And if we can engineer that advance, perhaps we can take the next great leap forward in miniaturization.
Researchers in the US, Japan and China led by Kaustav Banerjee have made the first high-performance inductors from intercalated graphene that work in the 10-50 GHz range, thanks to the mechanism of kinetic inductance. Banerjee’s Nanoelectronics Research Lab and their collaborators, Instead of using conventional metal inductors, t used graphene — carbon bonded together into an ultra-hard, highly-conductive configuration that also has a large kinetic inductance — to make the highest inductance-density material ever created.
In a paper published in Nature Electronics in April 2018, the group demonstrated that if you inserted bromine atoms between various layers of graphene, in a process known as intercalation, you could finally create a material where the kinetic inductance exceeded the theoretical limit of a traditional Faraday inductor.
Already achieving 50% greater inductance for its size, in a scalable way that should allow material scientists to miniaturize this type of device even further. If you can make the intercalation process more efficient, which is exactly what the team is now working on, you should be able to increase the inductance density even further. According to Banerjee.
Earlier, Rice University scientists Boris Yakobson and his colleagues discovered the by employing spiral form of atom-thin graphene the essential component can be scaled down to nano-size with macro-scale performance. The researchers determined that when a voltage is applied, current will flow around the helical path and produce a magnetic field, as it does in macro inductor-solenoids.
The nano-solenoids analyzed through computer models at Rice should be capable of producing powerful magnetic fields of about 1 tesla, about the same as the coils found in typical loudspeakers, according to Yakobson and his team. They found the magnetic field would be strongest in the hollow, nanometer-wide cavity at the spiral’s center.
The spiral form is attributable to a simple topological trick, he said. Graphene is made of hexagonal arrays of carbon atoms. Malformed hexagons known as dislocations along one edge force the graphene to twist around itself, akin to a continuous nanoribbon that mimics a mathematical construct known as a Riemann surface.
The researchers demonstrated theoretically how energy would flow through the hexagons in nano-solenoids with edges in either armchair or zigzag formations. In one case, they determined the performance of a conventional spiral inductor of 205 microns in diameter could be matched by a nano-solenoid 70 nanometers wide – nearly 10,000,000 times smaller.
Because graphene has no energy band gap (which gives a material semiconducting properties), electricity should move through without any barriers. But in fact, the width of the spiral and the configuration of the edges – either armchair or zigzag – influences how the current is distributed, and thus its inductive properties.
The researchers suggested it should be possible to isolate graphene screw dislocations from crystals of graphitic carbon (graphene in bulk form), but enticing graphene sheets to grow in a spiral would allow for better control of its properties, Yakobson said. Xu suggested nano-solenoids may also be useful as molecular relays or switchable traps for magnetic molecules or radicals in chemical probes.
References and Resources also include:
https://msne.rice.edu/news/graphene-nano-coils-are-natural-electromagnets
