Engineers at Stanford University in the USA have reportedly made a breakthrough in the development of wireless charging technology for EVs.
In a paper published in Nature Electronics, electrical engineer Shanhui Fan, and graduate student Sid Assawaworrarit, have demonstrated a technology that could one day be scaled up to power an electric car moving down the road.
In the nearer term, the system could also make it practical to wirelessly recharge robots as they move around in warehouses and on factory floors.
“This is a significant step toward a practical and efficient system for wirelessly re-charging automobiles and robots, even when they are moving high speeds,” said Fan.
“We would have to scale up the power to recharge a moving car, but I don’t think that’s a serious roadblock.
“For re-charging robots, we’re already within the range of practical usefulness.”
The development builds on work from three years ago, when the researchers developed a wireless charger that could transmit electricity even as the distance to the receiver changed.
However, that initial system only transmitted 10% of the power flowing through it and wasn’t deemed efficient enough to be practical.
Now, Fan and Assawaworrarit claim to have boosted the system’s wireless-transmission efficiency to 92%.
This means it can wirelessly transmit 10W of electricity over a distance of 2-3ft.
And according to Fan, the current system is “more than fast enough to re-supply a speeding automobile” as the wireless transmission takes “only a few milliseconds – a tiny fraction of the time it would take a car moving at 70mph to cross a 4ft charging zone”.
The only limiting factor, Fan said, will be how fast the car’s batteries can absorb all the power.
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