Highly Resonant Wireless Power Transfer: Safe, Efficient, and Over Distance

The idea of transmitting power through the air has been around for over a century, with Nikola Tesla’s pioneering ideas and experiments perhaps being the most well-known early attempts to do so. He had a vision of wirelessly distributing power over large distances using the earth’s ionosphere. Most approaches to wireless power transfer use an electromagnetic (EM) field of some frequency as the means by which the energy is transferred. At the high frequency end of the spectrum are optical techniques that use lasers to send power via a collimated beam of light to a remote detector where the received photons are converted to electrical energy. Efficient transmission over large distances is possible with this approach; however, complicated pointing and tracking mechanisms are needed to maintain proper alignment between moving transmitters and/or receivers.