Physicists Promise Wireless Power

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.'"

That would be really cool to see...

... and the subsequent and inevitable lawsuits brought about by people convinced that the wireless power technology is giving them cancer would probably get a little tiresome.

You have a point.

... there might be health issues -- but I suspect there will be lawsuits whether there are health issues or not.

Re:That would be really cool to see...

From the BBC Article:

5) Energy not transferred to laptop re-absorbed by source antenna. People/other objects not affected as not resonating at 6.4Mhz

That was at the bottom of the graphic. So it should be safe (however, seeing as the technology only exists as a computer model and not as reality, I would bet that if there are any safety issues they will only come to light after such a device is actually built)

Re:That would be really cool to see...

Fortunately there are no health issues with Lithium-ion batteries. I sleep with my laptop.

Re:That would be really cool to see...

Ummm ... I don't know if you're really unaware of the counter-argument here, but this has nothing to do with heating or not. The plain and simple fact is that DNA does not interact with light at microwave/radiowave frequencies. Therefore DNA can't get damaged by cell phone radiation. Therefore, it doesn't give you cancer. I'm still not aware of any non-crackpot scientific studies that show any evidence of tumors being caused by cell phones. If you can come up with a reference to this guy, I'd be happy to take a look, but he sure sounds like a crackpot to me.

Re:That would be really cool to see...

Ummm ... I don't know if you're really unaware of physics here, but if you stick a mouse in a microwave and turn the power to 11, the mouse sort of dies.

The absorption frequencies of DNA might not specifically match cellphone radiative frequencies, but high-power microwave radiation absolutely is dangerous to living tissue. Water absorbs very nicely at most microwave frequencies, and thermally-induced damage to water-containing tissues means the cell has to repair the damage. The thermal damage may be to the DNA, and it may be just to random proteins in the cell, but either way the cell has to start translating/transcribing, and when DNA is unravelled and depaired for transcription, there's a much greater chance of damage to the DNA happening from random processes, free radicals, stuff like that.

The question is: does sufficient damage happen to living tissue from radiation at the frequency and power density seen in cellphones, and I don't think anyone has positively answered that question yet.

Re:That would be really cool to see...

Not sure if this guy should be modded up or not since he is so rude. However, he makes a good point concerning near field and far field. I worked on a project as an undergraduate to build a near field microscope. Basically you run light through a piece of optical fiber that has a special needle-with-a-little-hole-in-the-tip end on it. As the light wave propagated from the tip, it would start out small, several times smaller than the wavelength of the light. The result was that the light would interact with features much smaller than the wavelength of the light. By moving the tip across the sample in a grid like fashion and detecting the reflected or transmitted light, it is possible to build a raster image of the sample in extremely high detail. I wouldn't be surprised if the effect were not common in nature and perhaps our own skin could cause it to happen. If that is the case, then it's possible that cell-phone radiation could interact with DNA or other small organelles which are needed for cell reproduction.

Re:Maybe it's the heating

Thats why I try not to move around too much, go out in the sun, or wear pants.

Any one of those could heat up my cells a little bit and give me cancer!

Discovered???!??!??

Umm..

hello.. Tesla??

ever hear of that guy??

yea.. he proposed this well.. 100 years ago..

incidently.. the security word in the image.. photon.. how appropriate..

Re:Discovered???!??!??

We might ALL know more of Tesla had JP Morgan not stopped his funding. Then again, Tesla had no problem with people getting power for free; which clearly caused issues for Morgan.

He was also chiefly responsible for the adoption of AC power. Edison was a very strong proponent of DC power distribution, and attacked any advocates of AC power distribution. AC won out for very practical reasons. (power conversion was mostly just a transformer)

Other than significant infrastructure cost, it's a pity that 3-phase power only enjoys success in commercial settings. It's much easier to make motors and other electricial appliance implementations with 3-phase power.

Yes, we owe a lot to Mr. Tesla.

RTFA??!?!?

Maybe the summary got edited to take out the word "discovered", but too many people are chiming in with "Tesla did it!". From the article itself:

...
US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players without wires.
The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of many metres, the researchers said.
...
Old technology
The team from MIT is not the first group to suggest wire-less energy transfer.
Nineteenth-century physicist and engineer Nikola Tesla experimented with long-range wire-less energy transfer, but his most ambitious attempt - the 29m high aerial known as Wardenclyffe Tower, in New York - failed when he ran out of money.

Yes. Tesla did it. We know it. The article knows it and states it plainly. The credit has been given. So can we discuss the actual feasibility for short distances, now?

Re:Discovered???!??!??

My understanding was that it wasn't pursued because Tesla marketed it as "Free Power" and no company was interested in giving people free anything at that time. Oh, wait, nothing's changed.

Now who's stupid

I bet I'm not the only one here who has taken the piss out of someone for asking if they can get a wireless power supply for their laptop

Re:Now who's stupid

Surely that would be a battery?

Problems

This would bring an entirely new scale of issues. People getting arrested for wireless power theft would be cute.

Great

now the people driving around in vans stealing my wireless don't even have to stop to recharge their laptops.

6.4Mhz - Oh Dear.

This thing is supposed to transmit at 6.4MHz. Searching for 6.4Mhz on Google brings back many many links about devices for which that frequency is important. And we wouldn't just be talking about a little bit of radio interference. This would be high power interference.

while you guys are at it...

tesla promised not only wireless power, but also death ray. could you make sure you deliver that to?

thanks!

signed,

technology historians for the realization of past promises

ps: don't think we've forgotten about those rocket cars mr. popular science!

Theoretically speaking

What would happen if these were used on highways to power electric cars? Batteries still only return a tenth of the energy put into charging them, so directly conveying power to automobiles would be interesting indeed.

Microscopic gods....

This sounds so much like one of the first Sci Fi books I ever read in high school called, "Microscopic gods" (or was it "Microcosmic gods"?) -- I think it was. A scientist creates microscopic evolution. He keeps experimenting, forcing "stresses" on the creatures to make them evolve. They eventually become sentient, intelligent, creative. To fund his research he invents wireless power. A congressman hooks up with him and uses subterfuge to wrist the new power invention from him. Meanwhile, his microscopic gods keep evolving until they are more advanced than the scientist himself. They refer to him as their "father" or "god" or something. The congressman sends in the military, using the wireless power, to take over the scientist's lab and even washington I think. The scientist sends a request to his creatures to invent an invulnerable forcefield to withstand the attack. They do so, but make it only big enough to cover their little area. He cannot contact them. They send him a -- for the first time ever -- message humbly asking if the parameters were right since they suspected he could not reach them. They also provide the means for him to communicate back. He tells them to increase the size to cover his island and they do. All the planes using the wireless power to take over the country crash, and senator is fouled and the scientist lives happily ever after in his grey, dome, shelled, island with his little gods. The story ends stating the military continues to use the dome for target practice....

Re:Loss

I can't see

that's why you're not a genius.

Re:Loss

Actually, the ironic thing is, if this is using Tesla's principles, it's extremely efficient. Maybe not as much as copper wire, but still rather higher than would be expected.

Re:Tesla ALREADY did it 100 years ago ? so ?

This is using frequency resonation, Tesla's system didn't.

Think about it this way.

Lets use sound.. Lets say I make a crystal that vibrates at an exact sound frequency, I can make that frequency sound causing no harm to anyone but that crystal, which will vibrate, and potentially break with intense exposure to the sound. Now of course making a sound intense enough to to shatter the crystal and at the same time cause no harm to ones ears is difficult but its possible.

Now do this with electromagnetic waves. The real trick is figuring out how not to waste energy pumping it out in all directions. But its about as dangerous as me sitting here 1000 feet from a major radio broadcast station.....

Tesla and radios. . .

I only know of Tesla due to the mention in the article, and a minute or so on Wiki.

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:Am I missing the point here...

Even cell phones are proved to cause cancer...

No, they're not. Cellular phones don't emit ionizing radiation, all their communications happen in the microwave band. This is not powerful enough to cause cell damage on its own. The thermal effects raise cell temperature a fraction of a degree on the surface of the head (an order of magnitude less than the change experienced by standing in sunlight), and the non-thermal effects show no rigorous evidence of genetic damage. Now, near a base station, the situation is a little different, but don't try to scare John Q. Citizen with unfounded FUD about cellular phones causing cancer.

More info here [wikipedia.org].