An Innovative System Capable to Turn on Any Turned Off electrical appliance by means of an efficient optical energy transfer

Abstract:
As a consequence of the worsening of the economical and energy crisis, the impact on the climatic changes, the public opinion is continuously becoming more and more aware about the issue of the energy consumption. The industry is following the lead by increasing its efforts proposing solutions to reduce as much as possible the energy consumption of electronics appliances. One of the main problems that the industry is trying to solve is the reduction of the power consumption of the appliances while in standby Mode where, as it is known, the energy is simply wasted for all the time that the equipment waits for being woken up by the user. As it is today, despite the huge effort to continuously reduce it, the electrical power consumption in Standby is far from being considered zero and unfortunately it cannot be neglected due to the enormous number of appliances which are commonly kept in this condition. In this paper, a system architecture is introduced which means to solve the problem of the power consumption of the electrical appliances while in standby. A novel technique is introduced which goes beyond the concept of the standby itself with a circuit architecture capable to turn on any completely off electrical appliance through an efficient transmission of optical power. It will be shown an innovative electrical circuit, using a specifically designed IR sensor/harvester, capable to start up any conventional turned off power supply from a maximum distance up to 7 meters. Interestingly this result is achieved by using a conventional IR remote control as optical power transmitter. Experimental results of a complete working prototype will be shown.