Wireless charger can charge 40 phones at 15 feet away

One of the in-things when it comes to charging a mobile device these days is wireless charging. While it does sound pretty cool that you can use a wireless charger to bring life back to your phone, what would be even cooler would be to charge 40 phones while they were 15 feet away. This is just what a wireless charger that has been developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology has done.

Those who own a phone that can charge wirelessly will be used to seeing the small pad that sits on the desk, which they place their phone onto, without plugging the phone in. However, the tech used by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology used something on a much larger scale. This was by way of a box of nine feet in length that is packed with coils and which can deliver power through a magnetic field up to 15 feet away. The team behind the tech showed off the technology recently and used it to power equipment at a nuclear power plant in March.

A professor of Nuclear & Quantum Engineering at KAIST said that the DCRS, Dipole Coil Resonant System, has “proved the possibility of a new remote power delivery mechanism that has never been tried at such a long distance.”

The DCRS comes in at nine feet in length, 315⁄16 inches wide by 7⅞ inches tall and could possibly be used in such as airports, allowing people to charge handsets without the need to all be crowded around the same small area. Of course at the moment this technology is not ready to be commercialized, however, the team behind it believes that one day long-range wireless charging stations are going to be a common sight, they will be just as popular as Wi-Fi hotspots.

The professor went on to say “Just like we see Wi-Fi zones everywhere today, we will eventually have many Wi-Power zones at such places as restaurants and streets that provide electric power wirelessly to electronic devices.”  “We will use all the devices anywhere without tangled wires attached and anytime without worrying about charging their batteries.”

This isn’t the first time that we have seen wireless charging over a long distance. Cota is a platform for charging wirelessly that is ready to become available commercially next year and can charge handsets from around 30 feet away. However, even in the prototype phase, DCRS packs a lot of power, with its ability to charge as many as 40 devices at the same time, including larger devices, like TVs.

The team behind DCRS created the prototype by improving systems that already exist using magnetic field to transfer the power. According to them, it is easier, more efficient and a lot less sensitive to interference from humidity and temperature. Their system is a great deal bigger than Cota, but they did say that the system can be scaled.