What and how wireless charging works?
Posted On Wireless charging technology has been around for more than 100 years, but its inclusion in devices such as Apple’s new iPhone line has given it new life. Here’s how it works, and why it could soon show up in everything from homes to robots.
Today, there are nearly a half dozen wireless charging technologies in use, all aimed at cutting cables to everything from smartphones and laptops to kitchen appliances and cars.
Will Magnets Affect Wireless Charging?
Wireless charging, also known as inductive charging, uses magnetic fields to transfer electricity wirelessly. Thus, magnets can cause interference with wireless charging, making it difficult for the two to pair together.
Apple chose to use the Qi specification, which uses inductive charging technology, for its iPhone 8 and iPhone X lineup of smartphones. Samsung committed to the same specification for its flagship Galaxy smartphones; in all, about 90 smartphone models use Qi today, making it the industry’s most popular among the three standards.
In addition to desktop charging stations (typically in the form of small charging pads), the automotive marketplace has also adopted in-cabin wireless charging.
How wireless charging works
Broadly speaking, there are three types of wireless charging, according to David Green, a research manager with IHS Markit. There are charging pads that use tightly-coupled electromagnetic inductive or non-radiative charging; charging bowls or through-surface type chargers that use loosely-coupled or radiative electromagnetic resonant charging that can transmit a charge a few centimeters; and uncoupled radio frequency (RF) wireless charging that allows a trickle charging capability at distances of many feet.
Both tightly coupled inductive and loosely-coupled resonant charging operate on the same principle of physics: a time-varying magnetic field induces a current in a closed loop of wire.
Is it bad to fully charge your smartphone?
With greater ease of charging via wireless technology, the question becomes: Is it bad for your mobile device battery to be fully charged all the time?
As a lithium-ion battery charges and discharges, ions pass back and forth between a positive electrode (made of lithium-cobalt oxide or lithium iron phosphate) and a negative electrode (made of carbon graphite).
As a battery charges, the positive electrode gives off lithium ions that move to the negative electrode and are stored as energy. As the battery discharges, those ions move back to the positive electrode to be used as electricity. As those lithium ions move back and forth, the electrolyte that acts as the transport medium degrades over time.
The higher the state of charge, the faster the electrolyte degrades, Srinivasan said.
Therefore, it’s best not only to keep your smartphone below its top charge but also to keep the charging and discharging pendulum from swinging wildly.
The debate will continue
As more lithium-ion batteries hit the market, in both consumer electronics and electric vehicles, the rhetoric over whether you should keep those batteries fully charged has heated up, Srinivasan said. His blog posts often receive long comment threads from both sides of the spectrum.
Leaving your smartphone or tablet fully charged will speed up the degradation of the battery, he said. But, he added, it’s not that simple.
The damage from fully charging your battery has lessened over time with more sophisticated mobile battery management systems and incremental improvements in the battery cell technology itself, he said.
For example, in 2007, when Steingart was a graduate student, taking a battery cell repeatedly to 4.2 volts meant “an early death” for it. he said. Today, the same damage to modern battery cells would require at least 4.4 volts.
Even though battery cell technology has improved, there are still too many industry variables to know definitively whether one battery will show greater endurance than another based on continuous charging.
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