Wireless charging is the wave of the future, a technology that has moved from novelty to the mainstream in the past few years. Wireless charging has many known benefits and its weaknesses are already being addressed. Wireless charging technology is expected to become a fifteen billion dollar industry by 2020.
How Wireless Charging Works
So, how does wireless charging work? The first person to discover the principles of wireless charging, Nikola Tesla, first realized you could transfer power between two items via an electromagnetic field. This is accomplished today by using a loop of wire around a bar magnet, the inductor. When current passes through the wire coil, an electromagnetic field is created around the magnet. This can be used to transfer voltage or charge to another, nearby item, which is typically the battery in another device.
The Technology behind Wireless Chargers
Most wireless power stations in use today use a large mat with an inductor inside. You lay the cell phones, tablets and other devices on the charging mat to draw the charge from the inductor inside the charging mat. The problem to date has been creating coils of wire and magnets at a low enough cost and high enough efficiency to be competitive with the standard power cable.
Wireless chargers use transmitters that communicate with receivers inside of the devices they charge to verify that they are compatible with the charging platform and should be charged. This prevents the charging platform trying to charge items that accidentally land on them or charge a device that isn’t compatible with the wireless charging station. A benefit of this is that the charging pad knows when to turn off once the devices are fully charged.
The Future of Wireless Charging
Wireless charging lets you charge the device without a cord, eliminating the need for finding a wall outlet or coping with multiple charging cords for as many devices. You’ll never again grab the wrong charging cord for your device as you head out the door. The lack of a charging port represents one less place dirt, debris, and water can enter the device and damage it.
There’s a much lower risk of being shocked, since charging elements are not exposed to the conductors. A mid-sized to large wireless charging device gives you one place to put all of your devices, from your cell phone to your smartwatch to your hearing aids. Ikea is designing furniture such as tables with built-in charging stations, so you don’t even have to buy a separate wireless charging device.
Wireless charging could make medical devices lifetime implants. For example, pacemaker batteries last several years. When it runs down, the patient needs surgery to replace the pacemaker. With wireless charging, the battery could be recharged by placing a charging device over the patient’s chest, eliminating the need for such surgery. Multiply this against the variety of medical implants starting to be used from artificial pancreas to drug pumps to neural stimulators and wireless charging will dramatically improve the lives of patients.
Wireless charging as a theory was discovered almost a century ago, but it wasn’t until recently that its efficiency and cost were at a point that it could rival the charging cable for a smart device. Wireless charging for a wide variety of devices is likely to replace the power cord because of its convenience. For medical patients, it is literally a life changing technology, while for the rest of us it eliminates many hassles and risks.