Small drones are increasingly entering our lives as a means of looking at something from a height or just for entertainment. But they still have a serious drawback - a small battery capacity. It lasts for a quarter of an hour or a little more.
Recharging from the mains requires at least the presence of the mains itself. Yes, and the drone will have to land, which is not convenient always and everywhere. Not surprisingly, engineering is busy looking for other solutions. One has just been proposed by LakeDiamond, a Swiss firm specializing in the manufacture of artificial diamonds and the development of technologies for their use.
The company's specialists suggested using optical radiation for energy transmission. This is not a very new idea, but before it was not very effective, since it requires a fairly powerful laser to implement it.
The company's specialists propose to obtain radiation of similar properties using a conventional LED and a small focusing device, the central part of which is a small square-shaped artificial diamond.
According to phys.org portal, a beam with a wavelength of 1.5 μm diverges very weakly within a few hundred meters, which makes it possible to use it for contactless transmission of energy, and not only to drones, which in this case can remain in the air, but also for some bigger cars. The transmitted power in the basic design is about 30 W, which is equivalent to the power of about 10 thousand laser pointers. We were unable to find any reports of this success on the company's website.
Sergey Sysoev