Far field wireless charging coming to a device near you
A proposal is made to build “clean, limitless and continuous power” using a modified blockchain on a far field wireless charging platform.
Far field wireless charging is potentially the next step in keeping smartphones, electric vehicles and other electronic devices charged up, moving beyond the near field or inductive charging of many of today’s devices and consigning those many USB cords to the archives of history.
Whereas near field charging requires the device to be in contact with the charger, far field charging draws on a remote transmitter of radio waves so that a device can be recharged anywhere in its vicinity.
The technology is still very much in its infancy. Early solutions such as Powercast’s Powerspot and Energous’s WattUp have ranges up to around 10m, although these are limited in the US at least as much as by regulation as the technology. Thus in practice use of such a single system would be restricted to a single room or nearby rooms and is unlikely to be suitable for a whole home.
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Energy harvesting receivers also obviously have to be embedded in the recipient devices.
Nevada-based Voice Life is taking the concept a step further eyeing the ambient high frequency radio and other radiation in the terahertz range that is all around us so that devices can be charged anywhere at any time.
The company describes its technology, currently in proof of concept, as comprised of a combination of a specialised universal transceiver incorporating blockchain technology enhanced by artificial intelligence and utilising current and future data and voice transmission networks.
Voice Life has now entered into a partnership with Verge Currency with its open source XVG cryptocurrency and decentralised innovation supporter rLoop – noted as winner of SpaceX’s Hyperloop high speed rail competition – to expand its far field wireless charging platform.
While details are limited, Voice Life claims to be building the world’s first open source blockchain based wireless power network with a mesh node constellation that will allow users to harvest and store energy on a real-time global basis while remaining in a secure and proven blockchain cryptography space chain network.
“The recent advancements in blockchain technology and the energy markets are all converging. I believe that the expansion of the Far Field Wireless Charging Platform with the involvement of Verge and rLoop is creating a major disruptive technology advancement,” says Voice Life founder Robert Smith of the initiative.
The blockchain technology appears to have multiple use cases. From the device perspective it serves to enable discovery, authentication and security for wireless energy reception, while also offering a payment system using the XVG currency.