FAQ
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Why is wireless charging part of the future of transportation?
Future transportation will be electric, and vehicles will be mostly autonomous. Charging autonomous vehicles requires wireless charging.
Wireless charging has many advantages:
Prevention of vandalism – the system is hidden from view and its elements are not accessible, thus avoiding the problem of vandalism which may take place in the urban area.
Convenience and full process automation is the main factor of autonomous transportation progress. In the non-autonomous vehicles, the manufacturers are competing to improve the driver comfort. Wireless charging will be a significant improvement in the user experience.
The leading car manufacturing companies already have invested in wireless charging. They all foresee wireless charging as a central part of their future activities.
What is unique about your technology?
Most car manufacturing companies have solved the problem of wireless charging with inductive coupling technology, employing energy transmission by magnetic induction from a TX coil, a part of the road/parking lot, to a RX coil located at the bottom of the vehicle.
This method has several disadvantages:
1/ Requires strict transverse alignment of TX and RX coils
2/ Incorporates expensive and bulky copper coils and H-Field absorbing material
3/ Exposes the user to hazardous magnetic radiation, which necessitates the use of H-Field absorbing panels on the vehicle side
4/ Requires pre-planning and the vehicle mechanical modifications
5/ Increases the TX subsystem deployment cost and complexity.
We transfer energy by the method of capacitive coupling. To transfer the energy we use electric fields instead magnetic fields.
Our method has many advantages:
1/ The method is not sensitive to the overlap required between the TX and RX coils.
2/ The whole system is much cheaper.
3/ The system is safer for users. It is much easier to block an electric field radiation than radiation of a magnetic field, thus eliminating the passengers exposure.
4/ The vehicle part of the system will be smaller, which will allow installation in any vehicle without the need of pre-planning and significant vehicle modification.
What do you know how to do that others don't?
Recent studies proved that the capacitive method may ensure sufficiently high power density and to be not less effective than systems based on magnetic coupling.
The main problem of transferring energy by capacitive method is the impact of co-located metallic and dielectric bodies on the system performance.
The solution that resolves this problem is the ‘holy grail’ of capacitive energy transfer technology. As far as we know, no practical and commercially available solution to this problem has yet been presented. The bulk of the company’s knowledge and its IP is in two novel methods enabling to overcome this problem.
Beyond that, our system has all the advantages that can provide the system modular architecture.
WHY MODULAR SYSTEM IS BETTER THAN SYSTEMS WITH CENTRALIZED ARCHITECTURE?
A modular system allows great flexibility and automatic adjustment to almost any power consumer requirement.
Number of 1kW basic units can be used to deliver charging power of 3KW and 15KW. In the first case we will use 3 modules and in the second case we will use 15 modules. The centralized architecture will force us to design two separate systems for 3KW or 15kW charging powers.
A modular system is more reliable because if one module fails, the system continues to deliver energy, although the energy is reduced by certain amount. In contrast, in the centralized system a single fault will disable the entire system operation.
The uniformity of production of a modular system allows for reduce manufacturing costs and stocks.
Entry into new applications hardly requires significant R&D since the meaning of the change is mainly causes change in the number of standard modules and software adjustments.
IF MAJORITY OF CAR MANUFACTURERS INVESTED IN WIRELESS CHARGING, WHY DON'T WE SEE THEIR CORDLESS CHARGING SYSTEMS IN WIDE CIRCULATION?
The existing wireless charging systems are very expensive, the installation on the side of the road is expensive and the installation on the vehicle side requires early pre-planning of the vehicles.
These are design, manufacturing and marketing challenges even in the case of companies leading in the field, preventing massive penetration of this technology to markets.
What is so special about your team that invented the solution?
In recent years, experienced analog & RF engineers have become a rare commodity. In particular, there is a shortage in experienced engineers in the field of antennas and high-power and high-frequency design, integration and manufacturing.
The two leading engineers of Remote Energy in a course of their professional careers were involved in a large number of complicated projects, gaining experience and reaching high level of professional skills. Both Alex and Serge are renowned in the industry. The due effort and mutual completion of the knowledge of the two engineers resulted in the breakthrough to a required technical solution.
It should be noted that Serge is a member of the International Electronics Association and has previously carried out special projects for the most advanced laboratories in the world, including Los Alamos laboratories in the USA.
The professional cooperation of these two experienced engineers with the rest of the company’s engineering and management team, positions Remote Energy at the forefront of technological capabilities and already resulted in the design breakthrough that is the basis of the company’s IP.
WHY DO YOU THINK YOUR CHARGING SYSTEM WILL COST LESS?
There are several reasons for this:
1/ production uniformity of the RF power units for the variety of different applications
2/ Production of the generic units in large quantities
3/ Quick adaptation to new performance requirements
4/ Relatively low physical profile of electronic boxes and TX/RX electrodes which requires relatively easy changes on the road infrastructure
5/ Aspiration for an installation solution in a vehicle that does not require creation of special service centers
WHAT IS THE COMPANY'S BUSINESS MODEL?
Remote Energy wants to be the Mobileye of wireless energy transfer and in the future to be the ‘Intel inside’ of the world of wireless charging.
Like Mobileye, Remote Energy is also focused in the first stage on the After Market applications, since the energy receiving electrodes of the vehicle side will be physically small. This will allow installation on the vehicle bottom by authorized independent installers and not by the designated service centers.
What do you want to do in the POC phase?
The POC stage addresses development of two independent novel designs, each covering specific niche of wireless battery charging market:
- Design Approach #1, suitable for medium power applications, like drones, E-scooters and industrial robot charging;
- Design Approach #2, aimed to EV battery charging.
Currently, we have already designed, manufactured and successfully tested the most critical and challenging elements of RF sections of both products, and performed testing of the entire system of the Design Approach #1. The system setup representing the Design Approach #2 is in the integration stage.
At the initial stage both setups are operated at the relatively low 100W power level, nevertheless sufficient to learn on the system ability to overcome the problems of
- significant lateral misalignment,
- bridging the 25cm and larger air gap barrier with sufficiently high transmission efficiency
- efficient operation in the vicinity of massive metallic or dielectric objects.
At the second stage, we plan upgrading the system power to the level of 1Kw, and in the third stage we will integrate several 1Kw modules into a single EV charging system.
IN WHAT ADDITIONAL APPLICATIONS CAN YOUR TECHNOLOGY BE USED?
The capacitive wireless power transmission technology has numerous applications:
- Maintenance and empowering of medical implants
- Wireless charging of home appliances such as: computers, TV screens, lighting and smart home devices, mobile phones, wall clocks, etc.
- Walls, floors, and ceilings in buildings without electrical wires
- Charging and feeding of domestic and industrial robots.
- Charging of light vehicles, forklifts, E-scooters, and other mobile platforms.
- Cable-less military and civilian platforms, such as ships and planes. The issue of reducing weight and tethering costs is especially important in unmanned platforms.