Although the wireless charging systems in CES 2008 aren’t as sophisticated as mentioned above, it had gotten pretty close. Powercast (who has been working on wireless charging since last year) is able to achieve power transmission for quite a distance as shown in the video below. Powercast uses RF (Radio Frequency) technology to actually beam EM waves in a direction to a transreceiver which then converts the EM waves back to electricity. Powercast claims that their transreceiver allows for better efficiency in receiving and converting the transmitted EM waves back to electricity. The Powercast display at the CES 2008 booth however, showed the technology powering up only small devices. On top of that, it is a uni-directional beaming of EM waves that allows the transfer of power. Move the transreceiver away from the beam, the power decays to zero. Although this is neat, it wouldn’t be much of a practical use I guess.
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Fulton Innovation, a new comer to wireless charging, showcased their technology at the CES 2008 which seems to have more practical use. Unlike Powercast, Fulton uses inductive coupling (similar to Wildcharge) to power up their devices. The thing about Fulton’s technology which I like is the intelligence that the transmitting source possesses. It is able to adapt to different kind of power needs from different power devices. This allows better source-to-load efficiency by not blasting all the power to free space. Another thing that I love about this technology is the ability to power up loads up to 1.5KWh at 98.6% efficiency! That’s pretty amazing for a wireless power charging system! The devices that we’ve seen so far were only able to power up smaller devices. Thus, Fulton has a huge potential to go on.
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videoSource: PCPRO.co.uk
There are many problems associated transferring power wirelessly. One of them is efficiency. Magnetic coupling seems to have a better efficiency output (maybe due to the close proximity of the source and load) as compared to the RF technology.
Another problem to overcome is safety. There will be fears of whether electricity can be transfered to any metallic object in the vicinity of the source, especially for the products that uses magnetic coupling. On top of that, would transferring power over the air cause any health concerns? Electromagnetic waves do interact with the environment as it propagates in free space.
Lastly, will magnetic coupling destroys your HDD, credit cards or any cards with a magnetic strip? It seems to work well with HDD from the video but they never really explain whether it will affect cards with magnetic strips.
So which direction will wireless charging go? Mobility through RF technology or high powered and high efficiency transmission through e-coupled technology? The beauty of technological advances - You can’t have the best of both worlds. Maybe it is too early to tell. We’ll find out soon enough!