Innovative start-up wins multiple awards
Contactless charging for robots and electric cars
Intelligent and powerful charging systems are in demand. Blue Inductive has developed a promising inductive charging technology. Its advantages: high efficiency, high system performance and a large distance between transmitter and receiver.
The start-up Blue Inductive develops contactless charging systems for electric cars and mobile robots. The company builds systems that can charge batteries wirelessly. The technology would allow electric vehicles to drive along charging lanes on highways and refuel at the same time. In the future, the technology should also make it possible to make a large number of vehicle batteries available to the power grid.
For the time being, however, the start-up primarily wants to serve mobile, autonomous industrial robots such as forklift trucks or assembly platforms. At its core, Blue Inductives etaLink technology does what induction stoves and some charging stations for electric toothbrushes and wireless charging devices for smartphones do: Electrical energy is transmitted via a magnetic field, whereby the transmitter and receiver can be up to 20 centimeters apart. The first product is set to go into series production in early 2018
The contactless charging systems from Blue Inductive are characterized by an efficiency of up to 95%, which puts them on a par with contemporary conventional charging systems with cables. According to the company, the charging systems' output of up to 22,000 W would be sufficient to charge up to 10,000 smartphones simultaneously.
The young company has now won first place in this year's "CyberOne Hightech Award Baden-Württemberg" business plan competition in the industrial technologies category. The award is endowed with 10,000 euros.
Blue Inductive was also awarded the Freiburg Innovation Prize in February 2017. The company is still very young: it was only founded in April 2016 from the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE. Blue Inductive receives support from the Central Office for Technology Transfer at the University of Freiburg and the start-up office located there.
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