Jamie Bennet
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is inviting potential vendors for a power beaming system design and demonstration project to attend a Proposers Day on Oct. 24.
DARPA will brief attendees on the objectives of Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay program at the event slated to take place at its conference center in Arlington, Virginia, according to a notice posted Monday on SAM.gov.
The agency aims to advance wireless power beaming technology by developing a relay payload that can selectively harvest energy from platform power, redirect optical energy and optimize beam quality by correcting optical wavefront irregularities.
Characteristics of relays developed through the POWER program will be studied for potential applications to a larger or scalable airborne wireless power beaming network, DARPA noted.
“We believe the next energy revolution will be enabled by the wireless energy web. It will dramatically compress transport timelines and resiliently provide distributed energy to consumers in air, on land, on the sea, undersea, and in space,” said Col. Paul Calhoun, a program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office.
