we've all had that moment you just lie down after a hard day of work and
realize oh hamburgers i forgot to plug in my
phone if only i could just magically charge it somewhere near my charger well
that's actually a thing but how in the world do you get electricity to travel
over distances further than what you get with current wireless charging pads that
your phone has to physically sit on well to start off it helps to understand why
something like qi charging or even electric toothbrush charger has to have
a gadget basically touching it in order to transfer power these types of
chargers work using a principle called electromagnetic induction you see when
you plug in a wireless charger it creates a current in a loop of wire
inside the charging pad this current in turn generates a magnetic field that can
actually cause current to flow inside another nearby coil such as the one
inside the charging spot on your phone or that electric toothbrush and although
this isn't too difficult to implement the issue is that it only works over
very short distances in fact the distances between the charger and the
device has to be much shorter than the diameter of the coil in order for it to
work properly we're talking like millimeters maybe even less here so one
form of distance charging takes the induction mechanism and improves it by
creating a resonance coupling you see currents connected to a capacitor like
inside a wireless charger naturally have their current change direction due to
the charge flowing from one end to the other going through the coil and then
accumulating in the other end making the current then reverse itself this is
called oscillation and the circuits have a natural frequency at which they'll
oscillate so due to some pretty complicated physics that's like
way beyond the scope of this video if you have two coils that oscillate at the
same frequency they will resonate and that energy will actually travel more
directly between them rather than just kind of going all over the place like
with a regular inductive coil this means instead of having to place a gadget
right on top of the charger the charger would instead work over a distance of
several centimeters even up to tens of centimeters with larger coils working
over longer distances this could prove useful not only for charging phones and
laptops by putting them into a charging basket or something like that so even if
they're just like a nearby charger and it's on your desk it still charges
perfectly fine but also for keeping low power objects such as wireless mice
smart home devices all that could just be perpetually powered with no wires at
all and because of their improved efficiency resonant coupling can also be
used to charge gadgets more quickly if you don't mind setting them atop a
charging pad dell actually has a resonant charging pad that can put out
30 watts of power to charge one of its laptops making it almost as fast as just
having it plugged into the wall resonant induction is also being incorporated
into a mercedes sedan where the car can just basically park over a coil in the
ground and start charging without any need for those messy wires but if you
want distance charging that works efficiently across say an entire room rf
charging or infrared charging might be a better bet you know how you can put
power in your home using light waves from the sun or how you can use
microwaves to heat up last night's leftovers except for pizza because
that's better cold well they both work using similar principles except without
the risk of sunburn or being boiled alive rf uses lower frequency radio
waves like your existing wi-fi router can transmit just a few milliwatts of
power one company energis is hoping that their own rf charger will catch on and
is marketing to be able to charge at distances of up to 15 feet but just like
the light from a flashlight rf charging attenuates that is to say it gets weaker
over a distance so placing a gadget near the edge of an rf charger's range means
that you probably won't be getting enough power to charge your phone although a smaller device like a
keyboard or a smartwatch might be fair game as for infrared charging we
actually collaborated with a company who is working on this tech wecharge in a
recent video where they showed us that even though ir can be used to transmit
more power even several watts making it suitable for distant smartphone charging
their handshake protocol stops transmission outright when it detects an
obstacle like a human hand or your eyeballs which help to get approved for
organizations like ul and fda there's still a lot of progress that can be made
at this time there aren't many devices that have the necessary receivers built
in for either rf or ir but if the technology matures we may be headed to a
much more wire-free world in the not-so-distance future hopefully apple
will build in support for one or both of these standards giving others the
courage to adopt them and we'll start seeing compatible products on the market
over the next few years but until then take a second to plug in your phone
before bed there's no telling what you might miss on if you don't what you
could be missing out on is ting ting is the mobile carrier that is focused on
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new device so thanks for watching like dislike check out our other videos but
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