Second Major Technical Milestone Reached
May 12th, 2022
Technical demonstrations are a core of any deep tech startup, and our team recently completed our second major technical demonstration at our Indianapolis development laboratory. With a goal of moving power wirelessly from orbit to the ground, incremental improvement and model validation is the key to successful deployment. You can see in the chart above we are on a trajectory to move significant power at significant distance this summer and we've done this in six months. More importantly, we are far more efficient than all the systems in the historical record - with 23% of radiated power recovered at the receiver as compared to 6% demonstrated by prior systems (out of the near field - chart from Rodenbeck et al, "Microwave and Millimeter Wave Power Beaming", IEEE Journal of Microwaves, Jan 2021. doi: 10.1109/JMW.2020.3033992). Our Demo #3 we expect to show more than 50% power received.
Our 2nd demonstration showed 4.91 Watts received at 5 meters distance at 10GHz. We believe this is the highest power end-to-end wireless power transfer demonstration ever (at anything above 2.5GHz), with prior RF efforts using radar transmitters as a microwave source as opposed to our internally-designed and developed transmit and receive arrays. The best thing about this demonstration is that we were able to validate our analysis tools - even though our test transmitter was not the exact configuration we designed around, the as-built system performed exactly as the simulation said it would. We use a thermal camera to map the microwave radiation impinging on the target with a radar-absorbing foam - see the predicted vs actual in the image below (left to right: transmit array, simulated intensity at 5m, thermal image).
We also confirmed the beam's 192 Watts per meter squared intensity is perfectly safe - with our CEO standing in the beam and confirming no power on the receiver via looking at the power meter. That was the only way to tell - he could barely feel the heat with his bare hand (microwaves convert to heat just below the skin's surface). There is no microwave exposure data available from human volunteers - so we are making our own, eventually working up to and past 500 Watts per meter squared (our maximum intensity ever).
Stay tuned for our next major milestone.
