Researchers Tap Laser Light as the Power Source of Future Smart Devices
A new design of power converter reaches a record 53 percent efficiency, boosting the amount of power you can transmit over fiber optics.
Researchers from the University of Ottawa, the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, and the National Research Council of Canada want to power your smart devices via laser light — using a new device that lowers losses in optical fiber transmission.
"In traditional power-over-fiber systems, most of the laser light is lost," explains corresponding author Karin Hinzern, a professor at the University of Ottawa's SUNLAB, of the problem the team set out to solve. "With these new devices, the fiber can be much longer. This could improve power to high voltage and monitoring sensors for smart grids without the risk of lightning faults, it could reduce sparking risks in hazardous environments, and could potentially transmit power and data simultaneously to remote devices on existing fiber optic infrastructure."
Fiber optic cables are the backbone of modern telecommunications, providing an easy way to transmit and receive data over long distances without the issues surrounding electrical cabling — like susceptibility to lightning strike when deployed outdoors, and the weight of copper required for high-speed communication over long distances. What they're not good at, though, is transferring power: where copper-based technologies like Power-over-Ethernet can carry tens of watts of power in addition to data, fiber optic cabling can only carry light — and the amount of power that makes it through to the other side drops dramatically with the length of the cable.
The team's solution is a multi-junction power converter, designed to extract as much power as possible from the light that reaches the end of the fiber. While we're still talking low overall power — the team's prototype device produced a little over 2V, at a record-breaking but still middling 53 percent efficiency — it's enough, the team says, to drive a range of devices including smart-grid monitoring systems, wind turbine blade sensors, aircraft fuel gauges, underwater sensors, and even remote video cameras — and could also be used to capture laser power in free space, without a tethering fiber optic cable.
The team's work has been published under open-access terms in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.