As UniServices celebrates the doubling of the University of Auckland Inventors’ Fund from $20 million to $40 million, the development and commercialisation of this technology is an example of real-world impact the University can have.

The basic concepts of wireless or inductive power transfer (IPT) have been known for more than a century. However, Auckland researchers have led the world in making wireless power transfer commercially useful and scalable to industry, says UniServices Executive Director of Commercialisation Will Charles.

The impact has already been immense within industry, making factories safer and production cheaper. The technology is now becoming more visible to consumers through wirelessly charged electronics, while wireless charging of electric vehicles is set to have enormous impact on our future.

The University of Auckland currently holds 294 granted patents and 92 live applications in the wireless power space, covering inductive, resonant transfer, bi-directional power transfer, magnetics and controllers.

“The commercial development of IPT technologies has transformed a number of industries and I would argue that it was first usefully invented here,” says Charles, who has been in his role since 2005 and has been instrumental in bringing IPT technologies to market. “The first team to show that it could be done usefully and scaled into industry was from the University of Auckland.”

The University’s first spin-out, the Auckland Nuclear Accessory Company (ANAC), which emerged from the physics department in 1966, created the world’s first commercially polarized ion source.

The company, which was one of New Zealand’s first tech firms, specialised in high-precision electromagnets. Although the company in its original incarnation no longer exists, the founders went on to be leaders in many companies in Silicon Valley, says Charles. One of the original suppliers to ANAC was Buckley Systems, which holds a dominant market share for large precision electromagnets used in a variety of industries including semi-conductors.

While ANAC didn’t develop IPT technologies, the company changed the perception at the University that academic and industrial research should operate in separate silos.

“They showed that you could do really high-quality research and make it commercially useful directly from a university lab,” says Charles.

Wirelessly powered lights are already widely used on roads and are specified for tunnels in Europe. Smart City Streets, a New Zealand company, uses University-developed IPT technology in its world-leading on-road lighting solutions.

“If you’ve got wireless lights and there’s a fire in a tunnel, the lights stay on for much longer,” says Charles. “Unfortunately, lots of people die when lights go out in tunnel fires. Wireless lights give them an extra 10 to 15 minutes to find their way out.”

An even bigger impact on the horizon is wireless charging of electric cars.

Professors John Boys and Grant Covic, who led the earlier work that led to the deal with Daifuku, turned their attention to electric vehicles in the late 1990s. Much of their early work was done on buses. Some of the first systems to charge buses wirelessly were installed in Turin and London in the early 2000s and are still operating.

The pair spun out a company, HaloIPT, to further develop wireless charging systems for electric vehicles. The company was later sold to Qualcomm, which was subsequently acquired by WiTricity, which has one of its R&D centres in Auckland and recruits Auckland PhD students every year. Boys and Covic won the Prime Minister’s Science Prize in 2013.

“The University has contributed more than 75 patent families to this technology and is an important contributor to the recently developed wireless charging standards for electric vehicles,” says Charles.

For the last decade or so, a major focus for the University team has been on charging electric vehicles while they’re moving. If widely deployed, the technology would enable an electric vehicle fleet to be on the move 24/7. Wireless charging will also encourage the widespread uptake of electric vehicles.

“Imagine having to have high-powered electrical cables on a street with on-street parking. The chances of shorting and wire theft would be intolerably high,” says Charles. “IPT means you’re not going to have wires all over the streets, so it’ll be much safer for everyone to drive an electric car.”

IPT technology has many other applications and potential applications, including in healthcare. In 2004, the technology was licenced to a spin-out company that was later acquired by Millar, a leader in medical pressure sensing technology. Now, Kitea Health, a start-up founded in 2022 based on Auckland Bioengineering Institute research, is developing wireless charging for implantable medical devices that enable the monitoring of pressure to manage chronic diseases such as hydrocephalus.

The University’s Power Electronics Lab, led by Covic, continues to innovate. New areas of research include improved low-cost power supplies, bidirectional power transfer, high-bandwidth communications, self-tuned high-power pick-up regulators, better magnetic structures and improved controllers.

“This work demonstrates the value of the University’s research impact,” says Charles. “The contribution we’ve made to the modern electronic world is astounding.”