Soon, you could charge your phone's battery over WiFi

New Delhi: Forget about the wires, even power banks, researchers at the University of Washington are looking at a future where you will be able to use WiFi to recharge your mobile phones- sans any wires.

A neat, clutter-free future is what the researchers are working on. They are working on a ‘power over WiFi’ technology that makes it possible to recharge devices wirelessly, through the air, from up to nearly 30 feet away.

A report on The Christian Science Monitor notes that the idea behind the technology is to leverage the existing WiFi infrastructure and do away with the inconvenience of plugging in wires by merging the two into a single system.

The technology uses a harvester that takes radio frequency (RF) power which Wi-Fi routers already transmit, and transforms it into usable direct current (DC) power. This ability to harness functioning WiFi power makes the system distinct from existing wireless charging technologies, such as those of Energous, which require their own, dedicated hardware.

As there is a limit to how much output a single router can manage at a given time, the researchers have developed a software that tricks the router into sending out power signals only when user traffic is below a certain level, so that both the functions run uninterrupted.

Co- researcher BryceKellogg said, “We optimized the router so that… Instead of having continuous power on one of your Wi-Fi channels, we split it among your three non-overlapping WiFi channels. That allows us to deliver about the same amount of power without impacting any one channel very much.”

The researchers have already tested the technology on a camera from 17 feet, on temperature sensors from 20 feet, and on rechargeable batteries from 28 feet. They also tested the technology’s effect on Internet speeds and found that the router’s charging ability did not affect their ability to surf the web.

With the potential to power the Internet of Things devices, the team is now looking at marketing possibilities and further improvements on the technology by streamling the harvesters to increase their maximum range.