Talk-Powered Cell Phones Won't Need Batteries

alphadogg writes "It's possible that in the future conversations on your cell phone could generate enough electrical power to run the phone, without batteries. That's one possible outcome of recent work by a team of Texas researchers, who appear to have discovered that by building a certain type of piezoelectric material to a specific thickness (about 21 nanometers, compared to a typical human hair of 100,000 nanometers), you can boost its energy production by 100 percent. And the technology could power not just phones, but a whole range of low-power mobile devices and sensors. The breakthrough is an example of 'energy harvesting' that can convert one kind of energy, such as vibrations or solar rays, into electricity."

Comments

not enough energy to power a modern cell phone

[liraz]

Most modern phones are probably much too power hungry to be get enough energy from audio vibrations, even you manage to ramp up the efficiency close to 100%, which is unlikely to ever be practical.

Where this could be useful is in specialized low-power devices that get bundled into emergency survival
kits.

OTOH, future cellular devices might incorporate enough improvements into power efficiency (e.g., e-ink displays), such that you could significantly extend battery life and perhaps even power a very basic subset of the phone when the battery runs out.

Also, harnessing vibrations efficiently might be very useful in surgically implanted medical devices where replacing the battery can be rather inconvenient.

Re:Why don't they use body heat?

[Tuidjy]

Why would you want one? We have watches working off the constant motion of our body/arm/wrist/whatever. Mine takes a few days before it winds down. I think that anyone that stays immobile for that long will not be doing so great in respect of body heat, either.

Re:Isn't this fairly common already

[BluBrick]

On the other hand, "funny" can now be used as the mod you give to "epic fail" posts (e.g. dead wrong or missed the joke). It can raise those posts up above the trolls for all to see, and open the authors to public embarrassment, all the while failing to reward them with karma. It's really not an unfair use of the moderation system. Who said funny has to mean laughing with the author - can't it mean laughing at the author?

Re:Isn't this fairly common already

[Molochi]

The reason funny gets modded insightful is because negative mods hurt karma, but funny doesn't add karma. Funny can draw just as much rebuttal as insightful. So if someone says something witty that holds an issue to the light of reason I'll go for the insightful mod.

Sometimes I'll mod something I regard as particularly dense as funny rather than a negative mod. But I laugh at stupid stuff in RL too.

If you don't agree, metamod.