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These Researchers Used A Laser To Wirelessly Charge A Smartphone

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Today's smartphones have an average battery life of 10 to 14 hours. Keeping devices charged wirelessly is also the top of the list for the likes of Apple whose AirPower, their new wireless power charger is rumored to ship in March 2018.

Early wireless charging pioneers like Powerkiss, a Finnish startup had a commercial vision for wireless charging 10 years ago in 2008 by embedding wireless charging capabilities into the furniture. The company was acquired by Powermat in 2013Wireless charging has sparked an industry standards war between those in the Qi Wireless camp backed by the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) and the Power Matters Alliance (PMA) endorsed by Powermat.

But now, engineers from the University of Washington say they have created a method to wirelessly charge a smartphone with an invisible laser beam just as rapidly as with a standard USB cable.

Researchers from the University of Washington mounted a thin power cell on the back of the smartphone to charge the smartphone using power from the charging laser beam. The team added customized safety features to protect the user if they walked into the charging beam's path including a 3D printed retro-reflector that would shut off the laser instantly and a heatsink on the smartphone that would dissipate excess heat from the laser.

The team also programmed the smartphone to emit a high-frequency acoustic chirp, inaudible to human ears but can be heard by laser emitters to signal its location to the charging beam, When the emitter detects the smartphone's location on a charging surface, like a table or countertop, the laser switches on and charges the power cell on the smartphone. 

The charging laser beam delivered two watts of power to a 15 square-inch area from 14 feet.

The results were published online in December 2017 in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable & Ubiquitous Technologies. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Google Faculty Research Awards.

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