Concepts for wireless energy transmission via laser
Leopold Summerer, Oisin Purcell
ESA - Advanced Concepts Team
Keplerlaan 1, NL-2201AZ Noordwijk, The Netherlands,
Leopold.Summerer@esa.int, +31-71-565-6227
The present paper intends to link several disciplines in an attempt to describe an application of
optical systems slightly out of their mainstream applications. Back in the middle age, optics, then the
“science of light” has been fundamental in understanding our universe and changing our perspective
of our place in it. Optics in form of laser communication and the use quantum encryption are entering
the field of space telecommunication and might well reveal to be the single most enabling technology
for the introduction of secure and high bandwidth communication. In the present paper a different
application of optical links is discussed, using laser links not only as a communications channel but
also as a means to transfer energy without wires. Different concepts and applications of wireless
power transmission via laser are discussed, including terrestrial and space-based applications.
1. INTRODUCTION
While the science of light and vision has always
fascinated and influenced humans, the beginning of
modern optics might be traced back to the famous
”Book of Optics” by Ibn al-Haytham
∗
, which for the
first time describes the theory of vision and light as
a ray theory, unifying geometrical optics with philo-
sophical physics. His book already described experi-
ments with lenses, mirrors, refraction, and reflection.
Modern scientific optics, with the invention of the
telescope in the 17
th
century by Dutch and Italian
astronomers and mathematicians revolutionised our
way of viewing the universe and the place of Earth
and thus ultimately our own place within it.
Optics is already one of the most cross disciplinary
disciplines, spanning from physics, chemistry, mathe-
matics, electrical engineering up to architecture, psy-
chology and medicine. This paper intends to describe
the application of optics and light in an area where it
is traditionally only marginally present: energy trans-
mission.
2. WIRELESS ENERGY TRANSMISSION
The first attempts to transmit energy wirelessly
with the purpose of doing so are attributed to N.
Tesla
†
at his laboratory in Long Island, New York
just 30 years after J. Maxwell
‡
had predicted in 1873
the transport of energy trough vacuum via electro-
magnetic waves, validated in principle 15 years later
by H. Hertz
§
. [1]
∗
Ibn al-Haytham, 965-1040; also known under the names of
Alhacen or Alhazen
†
Nikola Tesla, 1856-1943
‡
James Maxwell, 1831-1879
§
Heinrich Hertz, 1857-1894
Following the invention of the magnetron and the
klystron in the 1920 and 1930, the developments dur-
ing the second world war made microwave beams
available to a wider scientific community. The first
successful engineering approach to use microwaves for
effective energy transmission was done by W. Brown
¶
in the 1960s, by powering among other devices a teth-
ered helicopter. [2]
The first power stations in Earth orbit, taking ad-
vantage of the absence of day-night cycles to harvest
the energy of the sun were described by the early
space pioneers K. Tsiokovski
∗∗
and H. Oberth
††
. Pe-
ter Glaser is recognised as the first to combine the
visions of these early space pioneers with the practi-
cal advances in transmitting energy without wires by
W. Brown in his 1968 publication in Science, which
contained the first engineering description of a solar
power satellite (SPS). [3] It established a vision of a
sustainable, practically non-depletable and abundant
source of energy to meet world energy demands and
triggered the imagination of researchers around the
globe.
Since this pioneering article, several small and
larger scale studies and experiments have been per-
formed around the world in order to mature the con-
cept of solar power satellites further. For a descrip-
tion of how the concept had evolved since the 1968
publication, it is referred to [4]. While these stud-
ies and experiments were generally intensified during
times of high carbon fuel prices and received lower
attention during times of low oil and gas prices, the
idea was never considered mature enough to be put
on a larger industrial scale, but the general concept
of abundant, virtually CO
2
emission free power gen-
erated in orbit and transmitted to where needed on
¶
William Brown, 1916-1999
∗∗
Konstantin Tsiolkovski, 1957-1935
††
Hermann Oberth, 1894-1989
