Currently, commercial wireless power transfer is limited mainly to charging pads for phones: instead of plugging your phone directly into the wall, simply place it on top of a wireless charging pad. In the future, the same concept could be extended to much larger distances and higher transfer efficiencies, enabling entire rooms and even buildings to serve as wireless charging zones for phones, computers, and other electronic devices.
Although wireless power transfer (WPT) was famously pioneered by Tesla in the early 20th century, it was not until 2007 that a team of scientists from MIT demonstrated the feasibility of WPT (or "WiTricity"), by powering a 60-watt light bulb from a distance of two meters at 45% transfer efficiency.
Building on this work and others that have followed, a team of researchers led by Polina Kapitanova at ITMO University and Elizaveta Nenasheva at Giricond Research Institute, both in Saint Petersburg, Russia, have proposed a new WPT system. According to numerical simulations, their proposed system can maintain an 80% transfer efficiency across a distance of 20 centimeters, while experiencing only a very small decrease in the efficiency as the distance increases. Their work is published in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters.
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