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MIT Wirelessly Powers a Lightbulb
kcurtis writes "According to the Boston Globe, MIT Researchers have powered a light bulb remotely. The successful experiment lit a 60-watt light bulb from a power source two meters away, with no physical connection between the power source and the light bulb. Details about WiTricity, or wireless electricity, are scheduled to be reported today in Science Express, the advance online publication of the journal Science, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said. 'The team from MIT is not the first group to suggest wireless energy transfer. Nineteenth-century physicist and engineer Nikola Tesla experimented with long-range wireless 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. Others have worked on highly directional mechanisms of energy transfer such as lasers. However, unlike the MIT work, these require an uninterrupted line of sight, and are therefore not good for powering objects around the home.'"
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Apparently the power supply failed.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I want a wireless lightbulb hanging above my head, for when I have good ideas.
How does this differ from induction?
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
No longer having to search for an ethernet cable or phone jack for my modem was great! In a few years, I won't have to battle against the hippie-chick mac users in the coffee shop for one of the tables next to one of the three electrical outlets in the joint! The only problem is, I wouldn't call my computer a, "lap top," anymore, as I wouldn't want to put any device that is recharged wirelessly anywhere near my, ... um,... "equipment."
This isn't really the first lightbulb to be lit remotely. Flourescents can be lit by an EM field.... so in a microwave, or under highpower lines:
http://www.boxyit.com/r/index.htm
Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thraktuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
Nicoli Tesla, who claimed to be able to do this. Now, he might have been insane, but he was a genius. I fully believe he did the exact same thing, although probably wasted a lot more energy than they did, and for a much higher cost to create.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Lets tag this article under: cancer
(;
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
I'm tired of mistakes like this:
The successful experiment to lit a 60-watt light bulb
It should be "to lite a 60-watt light bult." Duh?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I don't know about cancer, but I'll wager standing in the way of a very high power transmitter would probably negate the need for condoms, or possibly skin.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Nope, never seen one of those before.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I mean - wireless power means such freedom - low cost infrastructure to third world countries, possibly power to the moon?? Simply awesome.
Hertz did a similar thing:z #Electromagnetic_research
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Rudolf_Hert
probably at around 50 MHz rather than 10 MHz but pretty similar. He didn't have a 60W bulb to power at the time (Where's Edison when you need him?) but he got a *spark* at similar distance. He even made it work through a box.
I know, the difference is related to how the filed is/was generated but this certainly isn't new.
n6gn
I can understand not wanting to RTFA but not RTFS?
come on!
40%,no,6 feet.
It won't cause cancer and according to "King of the Hill" this might increase your sperm count!
IOU one (1) signature
nah, there are enough people imagining this sort of garbage. Let's try studying it instead. MRI uses huge magnetic fields that researchers are exposed to on a daily basis and there is no solid data that it causes biologic harm. All waves that are invisible are not Roentgen's, let's be prudent rather than luddite.
ôó
Hell, back in the 60s, I had a monstrous WWII surplus transmitter, a BC-610 by name. This thing was the size of a large washing machine, and had vacuum tubes in it the size of your head. It would produce a vertiable torrent of RF. As a young ham operator, I was a little sketchy on the principles and practice of proper antenna load and impedance matching, so the whole feedline was radiating, and causing standing waves in all of the house wiring...in my house and the houses around ours. Enough power was intercepted by house wiring that the incandescent bulbs in light fixtures would glow dimly when I was on the air...even though they were turned off. You could hear my voice on telephones for approximately 10 houses radius, since non-linearities in the old phones were enough of a rectifier to do AM detection on the signal the phoen wiring picked up. Fluorescent tubes in my house & my immediate neighbours would light with a strange plasma looking pattern, caused by the structure of the standing waves present. And forget watching TV or listening to the radio in the neighborhood - my voice was heard on radios louder than the program material, and TV pictures were obliterated by a dancing pattern of hum bars. Enough complaining got back to my parents that I could only operate late late late at night....anyway, you can see why I am not that impressed with the concept of wireless power transmission...I did it in person over 40 years ago...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Please, do a little research before you try to correct someone.
o n%20power%20lines&btnG=Google+Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=high%20tensi
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Thanks for convenience, but in this day and age we are really working to bring our energy efficiency up rather than waste any more. I would prefer a standard for DC, low voltage charges to become as widely accepted as one for electrical outlets. Hopefully, every car, airplane and coffee table will have one to use then.
Or a robot trying to help an injured soldier.
Jonathanjk.com
First off, Nicola Tesla was not insane. Secondly, he *did* do this, many times in fact.
Personally, I am a bit miffed at the MIT folks for not giving credit where credit is due. This is the second article I have seen in the last month or two on this topic and they hardly even mention the fact that this is a key Tesla invention that was in fact accomplished by him and repeatably demonstrated. To read the articles one would think that the folks at MIT just sat down last week and invented this all by themselves when it is simply not true.
It *is* the case that Tesla is a "fan favorite" of the same type of folks that like to believe in free energy machines and it *is* the case that his *commercial* attempt at providing wireless power was never finished, but the technique and the methodology behind it was sound and I think even patented by Tesla.
To ignore his achievements, simply because many years after his death the man has gained some tertiary association with the lunatic fringe is a bit outrageous to my mind. The particular article referenced here even goes out of it's way to say that Tesla tried wireless power but "failed" (even though they mention off-handedly that it was only through lack of funds, not through any technical problems).
Tesla invented this technique, plain and simple. And those articles that fail to mention it are doing history a great dis-service.
Wacom are powering their tablet pens and mice wirelessly via simple electromagnetic induction. And they patented the hell out of it.
Just saying.
To ignore his achievements, simply because many years after his death the man has gained some tertiary association with the lunatic fringe is a bit outrageous to my mind. The particular article referenced here even goes out of it's way to say that Tesla tried wireless power but "failed" (even though they mention off-handedly that it was only through lack of funds, not through any technical problems). Speaking of people picking on Tesla, dis you ever see Edison's FUD about the dangers of alternating current?
My own conspiracy theory about Tesla is that his lack of funding was due to his old nemesis.
You can't take the sky from me...
Laser conduits for power??? Finally!
As a physics student I took an interest in Tesla and if you haven't read the book titled "A Man Out of Time", consider reading it. Tesla was building a tower to transmit power between the US and Europe (across the large ocean). The reason this is important is that is not accomplished by induction, but through some other means. Tesla's other means was probably really, really, high voltage as he was producing with his Tesla coils. Making high voltage is not a mystery, but directly it safely and then dropping it to a safe and usable potential is very difficult.
In short, this is NOT the same as holding a flourescent tube under a high voltage powerline. The MIT method uses controlled power tranmission over larger distances (2m or 6ft). The technique uses resonance frequency but has 40% loss, which is very bad meaning it is only 60% efficient. Many modern PSU (Power Supply Units) are 90%+ efficient. Unless they increase the efficiency, the power industry probably won't be jumping on board anytime soon.
The movie The Prestige explores that at some length.
rj
I came across this technology completely serendipitously a few weeks ago on How Things Work. There was a link to "wireless electricity" off the main page and I followed it and they discussed the MIT patents and I downloaded several different patents in the field. They were all from within the last few years and involved resonance coupled with induction.
What surprised me was the lack of imagination in the applications. They were talking about remotely recharging cell phones and MP3 players or letting you move around electronics without needing to find a plug. Well those are all fine ideas and quite obvious indeed but I saw nothing about the one area that seemed to potentially benefit the most from this: robotics.
All the pieces are there in robotics except for the one that this technology addresses: lightweight, high-density power. Oh, and let's not forget cheap.
Powering the lights without wires is a fine thing to do. I'm all for it. But what is the high energy deensity application that absolutely requires mobility? It seems to me that there is one in particular and that is robotics.
Moreover, this technology has a limitation of range that actually becomes a feature when applied to robotics. As we know all too well in the age of Iragi battle drones Asimov's laws of robotics are a fantasy relic of a time that couldn't imagine how software would really develop. The truth is, robots can be dangerous and this kind of technology effectively puts a leash on their range. They can do whatever within the home, but they can't just go out and go for a walk. It's a classic example of a limitation becoming a feauture.
So how would it solve the immigration issue?
I just mentioned this range limitation. So then, how could we use this for agricultural robots that would alleviate the need for low paid illegal immigrant farm labor? No problem. Obviously tractors bring their own power sources into the field. So, power in the field is not a problem. You would simply have gangs of robots attatched to resonant inductor power modules hanging off arms of the tractor. Say each tractor controls six platoons of robotic field hands with six resonant inductor orbs. They could work twenty four hours shifts. One tractor and labor gang could harvest dozens of farms per season in a timely manner.
If you need higher power, that's not a problem. There's no reason this technology is limited to 110volts. You can use 600V or 1200V. As much as you need. Your robotic workers would be as powerful as necessary.
Not only would it eliminate the need for foreign labor, it would also reduce the need to use high impact farming techniques such as posioning the soil with bromide gas and laying down plastic mulch. These things are done in the name of economy because it's too expensive to have human labor go through a farm and pick weeds. Monocrops are also planted for the same economic considerations. By dramatically shifting the labor equation you would enable a vast increase in the use of organic farming techniques.
The implications of this technology are far more revolutionary than re-charging an MP3 player.
About ten years ago, my dad came home from work and told me about a practical joke someone had played at work.
Some engineers had called the technician, complaining that the light in their office wouldn't turn off. The technician came, and no, it didn't turn the bulb off. He attached the multimeter to the switch... the power was being turned on and off by the switch. He attached it to the bulb itself... power was being cut. So he removed the bulb: it stayed on even when unplugged.
The engineers had pointed an active magnetron at the bulb.
Badass Resumes
While 40% isn't great for general use, I'd wager that it's several times more efficient, system-wide, than using non-rechargable batteries.
I wonder how well it takes to moving objects. Such a system could be a boon for moving us toward grid-powered electric vehicles if there were regular transmission coils embedded in heavily-trafficked roads, and they'd be a lot closer to the car than 7 feet, so they'd probably get much higher effiency numbers (perhaps even comparable to battery charge/discharge losses).
Nothing says 'welcome to the neighborhood' like a gunny sack full of dead squirrels.
Looks a lot like a transformer with a large air gap to me...
s fer/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer/
is wireless energy transmission new?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_energy_tran
hmm... maybe not...
30s of wikiing...: the question I have: is what is new here?
Is it that they are using low frequency long wave lengths?
Even then... power constraints will be real, and I wonder about efficiency...
and the 2 foot coil attached to my cell phone or laptop certainly
won't improve its portability...
----- "Profanity is the one language that all programmers understand."
The FCC has (had?) an exemption that allows RF testing on the site of a college / university.
If you tried this off-campus, you would be toast. The BBC article mentioned a 40% efficiency. For a 60 W light bulb, this implies about 150 W of total input power and 90 W of losses. Some of these losses must be RF losses. The device must be over the 1 W maximum transmitter power limit of the FCC for personal use, assuming the FCC would even permit the device.
The HF frequency range (10 MHz) is used extensively for communications. A number of amateur radio operators are likely to be unhappy if someone is using a device like this near their radio receivers.
The intense fields generated in MRI present more immediate and sometimes less manageable risks than cancer.
An MRI magnet can pull a stray hairpin across the room at 40 miles per hour. Hemostats, scissors, wheelchairs, patient gurneys, intravenous poles, and defibrillators have all been turned into projectiles capable of severe harm. When nonmedical people enter the magnet room, things can get even worse. In one instance, a police officer's gun discharged as it was sucked out of his grip; in another, a firefighter was trapped and nearly suffocated as he was drawn into the bore when the breathing apparatus strapped to his back became magnetized in the MRI room.
The phenomenon by which metal becomes spontaneously magnetized is ferromagnetism, which affects iron, nickel, cobalt, and many other familiar metals and alloys. Although most implants today are made with titanium or other nonferromagnetic metals, it's common knowledge that MRI systems can affect older angio and cerebral clips, bone pins, dental work, and even some tattoo dyes. That's the key reason patients are screened. What's less recognized is how MRI scanners may interfere with devices such as pacemakers, pulse oximeters, automated defibrillators, cardiac monitors, insulin pumps, cochlear implants, and vagus and other neurological stimulators.
Where a CT installation's lead shielding is designed to keep radiation inside, MRI shielding keeps stray radiowaves out. The focus is on protecting the magnet from interference, not the other way around.
Plate steel is the only physical material that can contain an MRI system's magnetic field. The lines of force penetrate brick, wood, concrete, cement--which means that not only people outside the MRI suite but even people and machines outside the building can be affected. Any steel in the building construction reshapes the magnetic fields in the MRI, and MRI magnetizes the steel in the building. So the levels of complexity are several orders of magnitude greater than a CT, even though they may not look all that different on the floor plan. Current designs using plate shielding, however, usually are not equipped to deal with the newest crop of 3 Tesla (3T) commercially available systems--and even higher-powered research magnets.
MRI magnets have been known to affect gamma cameras, nuclear medicine hot labs, PET/CT scanners, and other equipment--even those sited at what seems a reasonable distance. The extraordinary sensitivity of today's [imaging] systems--the same feature that makes them so valuable--makes them vulnerable to such disruptions. You don't want to expose them to anything significantly above normal. Basically, any magnetic force stronger than the one that makes a compass point north can disrupt or degrade some types of this equipment. MRI Facility Safety -- Understanding the Risks of Powerful Attraction
Proof positive in my book that women are the result of genetic damage.
I'm sure the power requirements are much lower, but yeah it's all about power level and exposure time. It could be handy for things that normally don't have anyone around, like runway lights that could light up with application forward looking radar or maybe something on the highway that could take advantage of the various auto-braking systems that are finding their way onto cars and trucks.
Personally, I am a bit miffed at the MIT folks for not giving credit where credit is due. This is the second article I have seen in the last month or two on this topic and they hardly even mention the fact that this is a key Tesla invention that was in fact accomplished by him and repeatably demonstrated. To read the articles one would think that the folks at MIT just sat down last week and invented this all by themselves when it is simply not true.
p df
The opening paragraph of their earlier paper:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0611/0611063.
In the early days of electromagnetism, before the electrical-wire grid was deployed, serious interest and effort was devoted (most notably by Nikola Tesla [1]) towards the development of schemes to transport energy over long distances without any carrier medium (e.g. wirelessly). These efforts appear to have met with little success. Radiative modes of omni-directional antennas (which work very well for information transfer) are not suitable for such energy transfer, because a vast majority of energy is wasted into free space. Directed radiation modes, using lasers or highly-directional antennas, can be efficiently used for energy transfer, even for long distances (transfer distance LTRANSLDEV, where LDEV is the characteristic size of the device), but require existence of an uninterruptible line-of-sight and a complicated tracking system in the case of mobile objects. Rapid development of autonomous electronics of recent years (e.g. laptops, cell-phones, house-hold robots, that all typically rely on chemical energy storage) justifies revisiting investigation of this issue. Today, we face a different challenge than Tesla: since the existing electrical-wire grid carries energy almost everywhere, even a medium-range (LTRANS fewLDEV) wireless energy transfer would be quite useful for many applications. There are several currently used schemes, which rely on non-radiative modes (magnetic induction), but they are restricted to very close-range (LTRANSLDEV) or very low-power (~mW) energy transfers [2,3,4,5,6].
As someone with a robotics degree from Carnegie Mellon, I feel to compelled to point out that you're ignoring just how abjectly stupid and incompetent robots still are. We do not have anywhere near the level of AI needed for robot farmers to deal with the messy, filthy, ever-changing world of a farm. Automatic tractors that can plow fields or spray crops, yes. Weeding and picking fruit, no. Power isn't the problem; intelligence is.
Just because Tesla was a genius doesn't mean he wasn't also insane. He invented a great many useful and wonderful things that are very important to the infrastructure of modern society, and was at times denied credit by jealous and antagonistic rivals, but he had many eccentricities, particularly in his later life, that point to him not having been entirely well in the head. He refused to eat where others could see him, freaked out about other people's hair touching him, and generally seems to have had serious problems maintaining normal interpersonal relationships with other people.
There is so much negativity in the air tonight!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Tesla demonstrated this WAY before MIT by using a carbon button bulb, which is incandescent, wirelessly. The Carbon Bulb was invented by Tesla to get around Edison's patent on a wire-based incandescent bulb.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
He was not Marconi's assistant, or any some such. Marconi used Tesla's patents for his radio.
Sometimes when I'm working on projects things disappear, I suspect gremlins.
Tesla worked under Edison for a short while. When he left, he insulted the "throw it at a wall and see what sticks" methodology to Edison's labs. Tesla stated that if Edison's team ever bothered with a little theory now and then instead of relentless experiments, he would have fewer cases of that 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration.
How will this technology affect my tinfoil hat? Do I need to make tinfoil underwear too? Or would that just be bad for the boys?
To VAXcat's comment here:
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http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2377
[right fscking on]
And the sargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."
-Alice's Restaurant, Arlo Guthrie
First place Nicola Tesla broadcasted HF power around the world. [Colorado Springs, CO] - 1 wire, many bulbs.
At one point he so overloaded the local grid he burned up the Plant turbines, where upon he sent his assistants to rebuild it properly - no charge of course.
Fascinating man.
http://www.teslascience.org/archive/descriptions/
The City of Colorado Springs, CO ignores Tesla historically [think of what else resides there], I was at this very spot in '05 - the neighborhood is suburban, the people in the house that occupy this historic site - haven't got a clue of what they're sitting on. None of them do, "never heard of 'em."
Tesla's Wardenclyffe plant. [Wardenclyffe (now Shoreham) on Long Island]
http://www.teslascience.org/archive/descriptions/
Where Westinghouse, to whom Tesla had forgiven millions in royalties, abandoned him. Frightened that his AC empire would crumble.
See, Niagara Falls:
http://www.teslascience.org/archive/descriptions/
Truly the most. ignored. genius. ever.
~hylas
Funny enough, I've heard similar about nuclear reactor operators. When I was a Navy nuke, word went around the smoke pit that the difference between female and male birthrates with nuke fathers was different enough to be statistically significant.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
"Now someone comes up with a remarkable breakthrough and you're bitching because it vaguely sounds like something you've heard of, except that you haven't bothered to RTFA to see why it's completely different."
... demonstrated in 1964, on the CBS Walter Cronkite News, a microwave powered helicopter that received all the power needed for flight from a microwave beam. ... In the 1969 to 1975 time period, Mr. Brown managed a program that increased the overall efficiency, or ratio of DC power out to DC power in, to a JPL certified efficiency of 54%, several times greater than generally expected. He was also technical director of a JPL Raytheon program that beamed power over a distance of one mile to a rectenna which intercepted a portion of the beam and converted it to 30 kilowatts of DC power with 84% efficiency."
I read the article. What is remarkable about this? What is the breakthrough? Even the article says that the breakthrough is merely that they had "followed through" what had been talked about previously. Which, frankly, is still really, really, wrong.
Here, have a look at this:
"William C. Brown
IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S): Bill Brown's Distinguished Career
What did the MIT group do? They lit a light bulb. How cute.
Sometimes, MIT gets in the news just because it is MIT.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
> According to the article, magnetic fields don't have any effect on the human body
An assertion completely invalidated by the use of "Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation" (TMS). Stick those three words into PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez) and you'll get lots of references (some false positives, but plenty of true ones).
It's presently being used to treat things like depression. Not because it does anything beneficial, but rather because it induces overload into the neural circuits under the coil, effectively shutting that area off from organized neural processing. Until we were able to get better focus and so use less power, about all it was good for was inducing seizures. That's still what it does, just on a scale that doesn't involve uncontrolled spreading of the over-activation. Even when the power is subcritical for inducing the localized overload, it still causes negative effects like massive headaches. No matter what frequency this widget runs at, there's brain processes that operate at that frequency. The brain is an EM pink noise generator from 1 Hz (EEG) to at least 4 GHz (water molecule "squidge" rate, an essential component of membrane reactivity).
I've been on both ends of a TMS coil in the lab. I wouldn't have this technology in my house until it was cleared by the FDA.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If we fully embrace nuclear power (and do it right* this time) then efficiency [b]could[/b] be less important then convenience.
Of course there's several hundred layers of mass public ignorance, greedy corporations and religious politicians who happen to be oil magnates in the way of that ever happening.
As I see it the only hope for the planet is Helium 3 reactors which could be sold to the public as a "clean start", even if the tangible benefits over existing nuclear power are mostly psychological.
{*} "Right" meaning the reactors aren't built in a mad hurry using mostly untested technology as part of a race to produce nuclear weapons.
No sig today...
The weird thing is plants seem to flourish, almost coming back from the dead when they spend time in the general MRI area. We saw a regular turn over of flowers from people that were looking to revive their plants.
Anything that has that drastic of an outcome on simple life forms, definitely needs to be studied longer to ascertain it's effect on other life forms. Whether it's good, or bad.
Shane
They're using a different technique to avoid needing line of sight or be harmful to humans (the article even mentions the microwave beaming, and how you can also use it to cook a chicken - not really something you'd want in the home powering up those speakers, is it?)
"How cute they lit a light bulb." Right. Its exactly the same because the end result is the same. That could go for pretty much any story here, right? Faster processor? "Bah, we were crunching numbers in the 50s. Whats the big deal here?"
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Yupp, this is "well known" in antenna and microwave R&D circles. There are many theories, ranging from RF exposure to working odd hours... I have sired four girls vs. zero boys, and even though this is just one data point, the trend is very much obvious in departments I've worked.
BTW, the combination of WiTricity and Pendry looks like a marriage made in heaven -> Metamagical materials and cargo cult electromagnetics go together...
The article mentions that the waste energy is reabsorbed by the transmitting coil. So while 40% of the energy makes it to the receiver coil, the other 60% isn't just spent heating up the room. It can still be used.