Disney Wireless Charging Room - How It Works

The Walt Disney Company, known worldwide for its cartoons and films from Disney Studios, interacts extensively with various laboratories as part of an informal collaboration with Disney Research. So, most recently, the company's engineers created a prototype of a room in which various electronic devices can be charged wirelessly.

The design of the room is implemented QSCR technology - Quasistatic Cavity Resonance, which translates from English as “quasistatic cavity resonance”. This technology involves the wireless supply of energy inside the volume of a single room, so that mobile devices inside the room could be charged without cable. According to the engineers, in the future offices will be equipped with such charging technologies.

Typically, a person, in order to charge a tablet, phone or other electronic device, has to look for a socket into which the charger can be inserted. This often turns out to be associated with a number of inconveniences: the socket is not always nearby, and the user will no longer be able to walk around the room with the gadget in his hands.

External batteries are also not always convenient, since this is extra weight, extra space, etc. As for the new method, it fundamentally solves all of these problems, because the energy is transferred to recharge wirelessly through space.

Charging device based on Qi standard have long been systematically implemented and gain popularity among consumers. The principle of operation of such devices is the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction, when two coils (one transmitting and the other receiving) interact at a distance through an electromagnetic field, and one coil is a source of energy, and the other is a receiver of electricity. But such charging stations are usually effective only at short distances, not more than the diameter of the transmitter coil, and therefore the charging device has to be put on a special stand for charging.

A feature of the new method is to overcome these technical limitations. Within the room, you can walk with a smartphone, and he will continue to charge. A large amount of energy will be available all the time within the volume of the entire room. In this case, quasistatic resonance in the cavity is safe for humans. A uniform magnetic field simply pulsates in a confined space with a frequency of 1.32 MHz.

The prototype of the room is a square room 4.9 by 4.9 meters in size, 2.3 meters high, and aluminum panels are mounted on the floor, walls and ceiling, and a copper pole, 72 mm in diameter, is installed in the center of the room.

A 25 mm gap is made in the middle of the column, into which it is mounted capacitor electrical capacity of 7.3 pF. When an alternating voltage with a frequency of 1.32 MHz arrives at the pole, standing electromagnetic waves form in the room around the pole - this is the basis for the principle of energy transfer to the space of the room.

When the engineers applied current from the generator to the plates, and adjusted the frequency to a resonance value of 1.32 MHz, waves began to radiate from the column, which, interacting with each other, formed a stable picture of standing waves indoors.

The result was a uniform electromagnetic field, the maximum magnetic induction of which fell on the space near the copper column in the center, the minimum - between the column and the walls. In these conditions, it remained only to place the receiving coil anywhere inside the room, and receive electricity to power the gadgets.

During the experiment, the power transmitted inside the room was about 15 watts, which was enough to power a dozen devices at the same time: lamps, a fan, a cell phone. Computer simulation allowed researchers to conclude that, fundamentally without harm to humans, 1.9 kW of power can be continuously supplied to a room, which will be enough to power 320 devices, about 6 watts each, as if 320 phones were being charged.

By the way, the technology can be scaled, for example, to include several poles in the system, each of which will be installed on its own part of the area, for example, in a large hangar or in a garage.

The developers plan to make the panels modular or even replace them with a conductive paint, with which the walls, floor and ceiling will be covered with the necessary layer. That is, the paths for modernization are being seen now. For large areas, as noted above, it will be sufficient to mount several copper poles.

There is only one serious nuance: the room is physically a closed loop and shields external radiation, therefore, signals from cellular transmitting stations and radio signals do not enter inside. Nevertheless, the technology may also seem attractive to manufacturers of infrastructure for electric vehicles, for example, having driven an electric vehicle into the QSCR's field of action, its battery can be charged in just half an hour.