Name: With Qi 2, Wireless Charging Takes a Step Toward the End of Power Cords
Uploaded: 2024-04-24T18:00:00Z
Duration: 6 min 27 s
Description: Wireless charging is seeing rapid innovation that is making it faster and more efficient. We break down how the technology works and what it could mean for a range of devices and accessories beyond cellphones. Illustration: Ryan Trefes

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Wireless charging is seeing rapid innovation that is making it faster and more efficient. We break down how the technology works and what it could mean for a range of devices and accessories beyond cellphones. Illustration: Ryan Trefes

https://m.wsj.net/video/20240424/4c7e1bf7-7268-4562-9edc-0a590f7c9851/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

With Qi 2, Wireless Charging Takes a Step Toward the End of Power Cords

Narrator: If you look inside a wireless charger, here's what you'll see, magnets, some copper coil. But how does all of this actually charge your phone? Wireless chargers send power from a transmitter to a receiver using electromagnetic induction. It's the same technology as induction cooking, but with a communication channel added to make the devices smart. But making this safe enough for smartphones takes a lot of work.

In a real product, the same thing would happen 110,000 times in a second.

Narrator: Without safety measures, this power could escape as heat and be dangerous. This is the tech behind wireless charging. This device from 1996 is a prototype of a phone that could charge wirelessly.

There were no connectors in it. It was pretty novel at the time, probably one of the first, and it's still working.

Narrator: Wireless charging involves a few different steps.

Here on this side we have the charging pad, and here we have the phone that you want to charge. So what happens is that the electricity is coming here via this wire, into this wireless charging pad. It is turned into magnetic field with this coil. The mantic field is reaching over to the coil in the phone, which is turned back to electricity with this coil and then used to charge the battery.

Narrator: When engineers began to work on wireless charging a few decades ago, the big issue was how to avoid heating up objects placed on the charger by mistake. If you accidentally placed a paperclip on the charging pad, how would you stop the magnetic field from heating the paperclip so much that it melted your phone case or even caught fire?

There were some really hard challenges. There was one particular thing that I could not solve, which is related to so-called foreign object detection. We want to make sure that there's nothing in between the unit that is transmitting the power and the unit that is receiving the power.

Narrator: The solution came a decade later. It relies on the transmitter and receiver communicating over the power signal. If there's an unexpected discrepancy between how much power is being sent and how much is being received, the charger sends less power or shuts off entirely. This was a central part of the wireless charging standard called Qi, which was released for the first time in 2010. Vuori is now the chair of the Qi ecosystem group with the Wireless Power Consortium, a group of about 350 companies that work on technologies standardizing the way all smartphones and other mobile electronic devices charge wirelessly and certifying that products brought to market are safe and work together. This is especially important because wireless chargers will soon begin using higher power levels to charge devices faster.

We have hundreds of tests. We are testing very thoroughly tests for things like overheating, for over voltage. So we have tests that are aiming to make sure that the products work safely together. So when you buy a product that has been certified for Qi, it works with the other Qi or Qi2 certified products and it's safe.

Narrator: The basic technology is just physics. Electromagnetic fields are invisible, but they can push and pull on particles over some distance, whether that's the electrons inside a wire or for instance, iron filings on a sheet of paper. The beauty of this is it doesn't require a physical connection to work

In the mid 90s when I started, there was a big problem with the connectors in the mobile phones. There were one of them parts that were breaking most often. And so therefore, I was asked to circumvent this problem by getting rid of the connector.

Narrator: Nokia released the first major smartphone with Qi charging, the Lumia 920.

It takes about an hour longer to charge the phone if you use the charging plate, but this is a trend that I think is coming to most devices. They call it wireless charging.

Narrator: Walt was right. The trend stuck around, but wireless charging isn't perfect. It can take a lot longer to charge your phone wirelessly. Even fast wireless chargers often take twice as long as wired ones. And users frequently struggle to get the alignment right. So late last year, the Wireless Power Consortium released its biggest update since 2010 Qi2 based on apple's proprietary mag safe design. The magnets ensure the transmitter and receiver coils line up precisely. This makes charging faster by increasing efficiency. Qi2 currently works at 15 watts, but the system was designed to adapt for higher wattages that will enable faster charging, though that won't be released until at least 2025.

As phones get more and more powerful as time goes on, that efficiency and that ability to charge faster is really important.

Narrator: One of the key benefits of Qi2 is that it brings Apple and other smartphones to the same universal charging standard, which enables a universe of widely compatible accessories and public chargers.

It gives companies confidence to deploy infrastructure, and I think we're going to see a tremendous amount of growth in wireless charging, deployment, and usage by customers.

Narrator: In the meantime, the group is also branching out to other applications like removing cords from kitchen appliances through a new standard called Ki.

The main challenge with Ki is that we're dealing with high powers all the way up to 2.2 kilowatts, which is the equivalent of two microwave ovens running at the same time.

Narrator: Fundamentally, it's just adapting the same technology that's used in wireless chargers or typical induction cooktops.

I put the kettle on, you hear the beep that it's now connected. I can turn it on, and now there's direct power transfer of 2.2 kilowatts to the kettle, and you see the water starting to boil in a matter of seconds. Second benefit is of course, that the surface is still cool to the touch, so there's no heat in the surface or in the bottom of my appliance.

Narrator: Ki may not be in your kitchen that soon, but the standard is launching late this year and products will likely appear on the market starting around 2025. But this technology is only becoming more widespread, and with Qi2 WPC's first generational update in more than a decade. Wireless charging could soon play a bigger role in people's lives.

I would hope that over time, wireless charging will deliver more ubiquity. If you look at something like wifi today, you don't think about it, it's just taken for granted that it'll be anywhere and everywhere, and we would hope that Qi2 starts enabling ubiquity.