Disney Researches Wireless Charging

2017-03-06 | By Maker.io Staff

When people think about Disney, they always think about the animation movies that were the highlight of many childhood memories. I, for one, remember Sword in the Stone, Mary Poppins, Lion King, Toy Story and many more. But little did you know that Disney was not only an animation movie company, but leaders in entertainment technology development with inventions like the multi-plane camera and circle vision 360, which can be seen at Disney theme parks.

When Disney acquired Pixar Animation Studios they also acquired a number of technology assets, including an excellence in research and design. Pixar was a source of inspiration for Disney and as such Disney created “Disney Research” with a sole purpose of delivering scientific & technological innovation to the company driving its value as a business.

There are 9 key areas of research that is currently taking place; Computer Graphics, Video Processing, Computer Vision, Robotics, Wireless Communication and Mobile Computing, Human-Computer Interaction, Behavioural Sciences, Materials Research and Machine Learning & Optimization. You can view all of Disney’s projects and publications at DisneyResearch.com. Just recently a project has caught my attention and is applicable to the IoT industry.

Quasistic Cavity Resonance of Ubiquitous Wireless Power Transfer

That certainly is a tongue twisting title, however it refers to the ability to power our electrical devices wirelessly through the air. If we think about current methods of wireless charging such as your smart phone or even your electric toothbrush you will notice a common factor, you need to be very close to the charging transmitter usually only a few centimetres away, this is due to the inductive charging method.

Toothbrush Inductive Charging Station

Disney has been researching how to generate the geometric freedom to enable automatic and almost un-aided wireless charging. Quasistatic cavity resonance (QSCR) can enable structures such as cabinets, rooms or warehouses to generate quasistatic magnetic fields also known as magnetoquasistatic fields, that can deliver kilowatts of power to a number of mobile receivers, as long as the receiver is within the field of scope defined by a single wavelength. The emitters are limited to a frequency of about 1KHz to 1MHz thus reducing the oscillating frequency and increases the range of the qusistatic region. The only draw back to using this method is that the induced voltage is significantly reduced as the quasistatic area increases.

Come to think of it, 99% of most households probably already have a device that similarly replicates the effect of how QSCR works, a microwave oven. A microwave is a cavity resonator where the vacuum tube acts as the resonator and the closed metal structure the cavity. The only major difference is that the microwave oven uses very high frequency (VHF) signals typically between 300MHz to 3GHz in a concentrated space.

In a demonstration experimental room, Disney showed that a 54 meter cubed room can deliver power to small coiled receivers in almost any available position with 40-95% energy efficiency and up to a whopping 1900 watts, which is within the government safety standards.

Experimental Room

What does this have to do with IoT?

One of the biggest challenges in the IoT industry is power, how are you going to power your devices in the field. This technology could be particular with warehousing and distribution, where there could be thousands of sensors monitoring stock levels and racking space or hand-held mobile scanning devices that constantly require charging every few hours or so. You could deploy your sensors without the worry of either having to charge them every so soften, having to run thousands of kilometres of power cables everywhere or being restricted in where they are deployed physically. Not only would it be convenient and require less planning, but also significantly reducing cost with less overheads.

Summary

QSCR is just one of many projects that Disney is researching and its certainly an interesting topic which could innovate the way we wirelessly charge and power our devices.

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