PowerBeam Demos Wireless Electricity At CES 109
JadedApprentice writes "Caught a mention of this startup yesterday on CNBC while they were reviewing the latest gadgets at CES. In the off chance that there was anything remotely feasible or safe about the wireless power prototypes PowerBeam had on display, I took a quick google and found this nice little write-up on the technology (along with some priceless comments for those that scroll down, and I'm not talking about those on the page below).
Bottom line: while it's possibly safe, it may not be efficient and it sure as hell won't power your 1200W gaming rig, the guys at PowerBeam are hoping the convenience of wireless power delivered through directed IR lasers will not only give you the coolest living room in town, but make them very rich in the process"
This may be the only one using lasers, but there's a fair gaggle of wireless power schemes on the floor at CES. Besides several chargers limited to charging the controllers of specific game consoles, I walked through a working high-concept demo put on by PowerMat (also mentioned in that PC Magazine article), which relies on dedicated per-device sleeves and dongles to power cameras, phones, and other necessary pocket-fillers; the sleeve-equipped devices then sit to charge on one of the PowerMat induction mats. That means that if your gizmo isn't one for which a sleeve or dongle is available, you're out of luck, unless it uses AA or AAA batteries (there's a charger made to fit on the mat) or can be powered by USB (for which the company has hockey-puck sized USB-power sources, which, Yes, sit on the induction mat). Impressive, but at $30 a pop, that would mean a fair outlay to convert many gadgets to use such a system.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
This system just seems impractical at any scale. For the dump-the-gadget-on-the-mat charging scenario, dealing with inductive inefficiencies is going to be easier than dealing with solar cell inefficiency and having to aim the laser at the gadget. For fixed stuff, you are going to have to align the laser and either have a backup battery, or just deal with the device shutting down, if somebody interrupts the beam. Getting wireless power than can follow a moving target around will mean fairly sophisticated tracking and targeting systems, and possibly multiple emitters.
wireless you say? (Score:4, Insightful)
how many power cords will this save? ZERO.
Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course none of the above is remotely feasible in the near future (maybe ever), but now maybe you understand why people are so eager to find a true wireless electricity system.
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
So, what are the risks that I'll end up powering my retina
Apparently pretty low. They're using wavelengths that the eye is opaque to.
Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with power is that it's powerful.
The problem with wireless is that there's nothing to contain the information/power you are sending down it.
Thus, sending power over wireless is one of those things that ain't gonna catch on until someone REALLY comes up with a breakthrough... i.e. using some sort of technique that we didn't imagine or utilitising some counter-intuitive quantum principle or something. All the current methods (magnetic induction, pointing a "beam" of some kind) have extremely fatal flaws. At the moment, a 10p bit of copper not only ensures relatively efficient transmission over a much wider range of uses (analog/digital data and power, even simultaneously) but also makes sure it doesn't leak out anywhere and kill anyone by covering it in a millimetre-thick bit of plastic.
A wireless "beam" system is inherently susceptible to obstacles which, we assume, must recieve the power in absence of its intended target. So the power either has to be very low to be safe, or it has to be in a form that won't affect *anything* in its path. I don't think lasers could be said to "not affect things in their path", so it has to be very low power to be safe (what's the safe wattage for a laser in your eye? We're talking 1mW or something). Now, you can get "fancy" without thinking too much - a wider beam, which spreads the power over a small area which has to be beamed to the device etc. but all you're doing is adding more complexity, bulk, components, etc. and reducing convenience.
Magnetic induction is one of those things where the energy is relatively safe (magnetic fields) and, unfortunately, low-power and non-discriminatory about its dissipation - the stuff leaks in all directions wasting more of its (already quite low) power, in 3 dimensions which means that you're now getting useful output power proportional to the inverse cube of your input. If you scale up to larger-power fields you start intefering with other things - inducing currents in nearby metals, playing hell with magnetic devices, wiping credit cards etc. About the only practical use is short-range, low-power devices with their own power store (batteries). You won't be able to use this for anything serious yet and you're coming up with a marvellously complicated replacement for a 10p bit of cable and a mains transformer.
This is one of those problems that we'll bodge solutions to for the next fifty years and then, at some point, discover some fantastic bit of physics that lets us transport large amounts of energy from one place to another without affecting anything en route. The entire principle will be so brilliant that we'll instantly start ditching wired power overnight (probably before we know that it's completely safe). Until then, this "invention" will be consigned to the gimmick / pound shop / toy market and not actually do anything really useful.
Stop faffing about by using stuff that's sitting on a shelf in your inventor's shed to move energy from one place to another. We can do it already, in a myriad of quite obvious (and inefficient, useless) ways but the implicit problem is that the energy we "move" affects things in its path, or is affected by things in its path, to such a degree that it's not viable to use or invest in... until that problem is solved wireless power will not move on.
We did the same with computer data - first it was consigned to copper. Then lots of people came up with lots of fancy ways to try to use it without copper (infrared, microwave, radio, etc.). People were building RS232-Infrared gadgets in their workrooms. It wasn't until there was a fairly reliable, non-line-of-sight, large-enough-range, power-efficient-enough, wide-enough-bandwidth way to do so that people actually starting taking wireless ethernet/bluetooth/etc. seriously.
The rule of thumb I'd use is: Can you do it on a large scale and be useful to the big players? If not, it's pointless trying. This was true of solar - there were specialised uses that could pump investment money into i
Re:less efficient? Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought we were supposed to be looking for ways to be more energy efficient, not ways to be less energy efficient?
Consumers are always looking for ways to have everything be more convenient.
Efficiency is usually a secondary concern.
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
That was Tesla's idea around the turn of last century, and what he made large Tesla coils [wikipedia.org] for.
It is possible to do, but there are very large issues that have to be dealt with, mostly the incredible inefficiency.
Re:What's the point? (Score:2, Insightful)
You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!
Re:less efficient? Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wireless Plumbing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
A momentary pulse of heat to the cornea isn't going to do any real damage.
Depends on how much energy is behind that pulse.