Wireless charging in everyday devices It is a resource that provides comfort. In other areas, wireless and remote charging implies a much more powerful advantage: supremacy over a rival. That is precisely what China is testing, how to maintain a drone fleet flying almost indefinitely thanks to a microwave charge injected from a ground system.
And they are not the only ones.
In short. A few days ago, Chinese scientists from Xidian University published a peer-reviewed article in the journal Aeronautical Science & Technology in which they presented a system microwave emitter that could send energy to an array of antennas installed on the top of a drone to charge the vehicle’s battery in mid-flight.
The most important thing is that it works while the ground vehicle and the drone are moving, which eliminates the need for a stationary charge that would make no sense from a strategic point of view.
Image of Xidian University
How it works. For the system to work, and as we read in SCMPthe researchers integrated a GPS positioning system that allowed a drone and a ground vehicle to be aligned. On the ground there is the microwave emitter and the drone has a series of antennas at the bottom that collect the energy.
In tests, the system kept fixed-wing drones in the air for up to 3.1 hours at an altitude of 15 meters. The great challenge was maintaining the alignment between the drone and the ground vehicle to maximize the load, but once the obstacle with the GPS system was overcome, the drone can stay in the air depending only on the vehicle’s fuel.
On the other hand, we are approaching it from the point of view of indefinite autonomy, but such a system would also allow drones to have less battery (which, in the end, adds weight) and have more carrying capacity.
The BIG asterisk. Defense analysts liken it to a “land-based aircraft carrier” in which an armored vehicle on the ground is both the command and power node, monitoring, charging and providing logistical support to the drones in a manner similar to that of a aircraft carrier It is the lifeline of manned fighters.
However, the system has a huge problem: it is extremely inefficient. The Xidian team estimates that the efficiency of the microwave ‘cannon’ is between 3 and 5%. It’s… ridiculous, which means that the vast majority of the energy emitted is simply wasted.
Why not a laser? It’s the big question. A laser system is more precise and has a longer range, which opens the doors to other types of missions. However, being a beam of light and not directly the energy that we launch, the laser is very sensitive to interference such as fog and dust.
Also, think of the laser as a precision rifle and the microwave as a shotgun: any turbulence or bump in the road would affect the beam, but microwave energy has a wider range of action.
China is not alone. Chinese analysts point out that it is a promising concept, but also something that is very far from being able to be applied to satisfy an immediate operational need. What it is, is one more step to find that way to get those drones that are appearing to be a very valuable element on the battlefield, as the wars in Ukraine and Iran, unfortunately, are demonstrating.
The advance is important because Xidian has time working in the theoretical framework of the technology, but it is now that they have carried out a successful field test.
Now, they are not alone, since the American agency DARPA is experimenting with radio frequency and laser to charge drones remotely, and in Germany, Rheinmetall is also developing wireless charging platforms for unmanned ground vehicles, although in this case, the drones are perched on a platform.
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