Engineers develop lasers that can charge your phone just as fast as a USB cable

Wireless tech that uses only lasers to charge battery-operated devices like phones are being developed.

The charger uses safe lasers that take about as long to charge a phone as a USB cable would.

This breakthrough development is being worked on by engineers at the University of Washington (UW) and the study has been published in the journal “Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable & Ubiquitous Technologies”, according to Phys.org. A narrow, invisible beam of ‘red’ laser light, the team found, is sufficient to charge a mobile phone wirelessly from across the room.

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By attaching a thin power cell to the back of a smartphone, researchers were able to generate power from a laser pointed at it. To bleed off excess heat from the laser, the device also has a flat metal heatsink. The laser will also cut off when the charger is not in line with the beam. This is accomplished through a reflector-based mechanism that keeps the beam on only if it is charging the phone.

Lasers can deliver steady power of up to 2 watts across a distance of about 4.3 metres to cover an area of nearly a square metre (96.7 sq cm). The emitter can also be made to project charging lasers to cover 100 sq cm over a distance of 12 metres. That means the phone could be placed on any surface, for example, a table top and, as long as it is on the table, it will receive the charge.

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