Physicists Promise Wireless Power 411
StrongGlad writes "The tangle of cables and plugs needed to recharge today's electronic gadgets could soon be a thing of the past. Researchers at MIT have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power wirelessly to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players. In a nutshell, their solution entails installing special 'non-radiative' antennae with identical resonant frequencies on both the power transmitter and the receiving device. Any energy not diverted into a gadget or appliance is simply reabsorbed. The system currently under development is designed to operate at distances of 3 to 5 meters, but the researchers claim that it could be adapted to factory-scale applications, or miniaturized for use in the 'microscopic world.'"
Loss (Score:2, Interesting)
It would also suck to have a random bdy part resonate in a similar frequency
laptops and MP3 players? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That would be really cool to see... (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't think there are any safety issues inherent here? I for one was surprised to see no discussion of it at all in the BBC article.
It well could be safe (or at least as safe as any other tech currently in use) but, man, I'd be looking at it very closely myself if I were responsible for bringing it to market.
wouldn't this (Score:4, Interesting)
Theoretically speaking (Score:5, Interesting)
Yey.. tesla did this, many many years ago (Score:3, Interesting)
The only wireless energy source transmission I've seen so far is with RFID tags. have you ever taken one apart? Chek out the
antennea.. much like the tesla antennea.
Microscopic gods.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Delivering power has never been the problem... (Score:3, Interesting)
A great deal of Tesla's achievements are apocryphal. There is no real proof about claims of wireless power to motors miles away and other things people attribute to him. In reality he was a clever guy but not this victim of forward thinking/backwards government as his myth protrays him as.
Re:That would be really cool to see... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Discovered???!??!?? (Score:3, Interesting)
link [nuenergy.org]
Tesla and radios. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
You're not alone. It's amazing how the man who is largely responsible for the use of AC power in our society, (Edison tried to champion DC because AC with all it's complex maths was too difficult to understand!), and the radio, (Marconi basically just used Tesla's insights to deliver a viable product for the war effort in WWI), goes unheralded.
There's a reason for this. Tesla worked in such a way which would have exposed the world to ways of thinking about reality which lead to freedom. --Despite his push for exactly the kind of power distribution system described in this article, such thinking would have eventually led to an understanding that all matter, (including elements of the human nervous system), resonates at specific frequencies. This would have led people to question things like cell phones a little more carefully before accepting them.
I've looked and looked, but I cannot find the reference I originally read many years ago now. . . His discovery of the radio was sparked by an incident where he was instantly aware that his mother who was in another country at the time, had just experienced a severe trauma. This experience is what caused him to think along the lines of sympathetic resonance. The science book people of today don't like guys who talk about such things. Again, it's about withholding freeing knowledge from the populace so that they are more easily controlled.
-FL
Re:Tesla ALREADY did it 100 years ago ? so ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:That would be really cool to see... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Tesla... (Score:3, Interesting)
Unlike what Tesla thought about the aether, we now know what RF energy is, how it propagates, and how it stores energy. We have a decent command over a large portion of the spectrum under visible light (400 nm and lower), and we understand that the frequency is linked to the relative energy of the RF.
I once created a 20.5 MHz version of this using a car battery, but since there's soo much energy, filtering is almost pointless. I ended up wiping out a nice 4 MHz chunk of spectrum and had the FCC on me. To put it bluntly, this stuff is worse than spark-gap xmitters. I ended up dismantling this contraption when I received my Ticket (amateur radio license)
Lest to say, it IS possible, but stick with very very low power stuff over short distances. Otherwise you'll end up doing bad things to your local electronics and receiving gear.
KC9JEF.
Re:Hard enough as it is (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps you have received electric shocks more than once, but you can only be electrocuted (killed by an electric shock) once.
The real danger here is excessive heating of living bodies, and possible RF burns if your hand gets too near the power transmitter. At 6 MHz, it's too high a frequency for the nervous system to respond, thus it won't shock you, but it still can hurt you.
Re:Discovered???!??!?? (Score:4, Interesting)
Tesla's method of wireless power falls into the latter. Even if there was a copper conspiracy, it would be a good thing, because it stopped money from being poured into an unworkable design. It was based on countless false claims and pseudoscience (random example: The atmosphere above 5km is so thin that it ceases to be an insulator and instead conducts electricity with almost no losses over long distances) -- most of them simply assumptions, without a hint of scientific backing, let alone a calculation on something so critical as efficiency.
Why Tesla is treated in a cultlike fashion ("He said it -- it must be true!") by many people around here is beyond me. He invented some great stuff. He also proposed a good bit of pseudoscience. The two are not mutually exclusive, people. In his later years, he was nearly broke, and was desperate for new contracts. He became OCD. He claimed to have completed a unified field theory, yet no notes on it were ever found. He claimed that spacetime wasn't curved, and thought that Einstein was just bedazzling people and keeping them from the truth. He made astounding claims about what his "death ray" could do, without ever doing the math (obviously -- it was basically an ion drive). He started talking about creating a "wall of light" by using a certain pattern to manipulate electromagnetic waves which would allow spacetime and matter to be tweaked at will. He even proposed a device to take pictures of peoples thoughts, which he thought appeared in the retina. He proposed an earthquake machine, and said he could shatter the world if he built a big enough resonator.
The list goes on.
Re:wouldn't this (Score:3, Interesting)