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Pushing 800W of Wireless Power at 5 Meters
Joe Decker writes "The Nevada Lightning Laboratory has experimented with Nicola Tesla's methods of wireless power transmission to push 800 Watts over 5 meters, besting MITs mark of 60W over 2 meters last year. (May I dream of wireless laptop power? I hate power cords.)"
because we have that much extra money and energy in the dying world for such a waste
500 MHz +/- 100 MHz
800 Watts over 5 meters, ...
(May I dream of wireless laptop power? I hate power cords.)
I think I'll pass on that. Don't really want that sort of power aimed directly at the boys.
I've seen more watts over more distance all my life.
http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/primer/lightning/ltg_damage.html
You just don't want to stand between the source and the destination...
The link: "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla"
The summary Nicola Tesla's
Who is right? The world may never know...
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
May I dream of wireless laptop power? I hate power cords
Depends - do you want kids in future?
Try using that laptop with any kind of wireless connection when it is powered via wireless power and see what transfer speeds you get...
This is making my hair stand on end just thinking about this achievement.
Or I am a little too close.
So what happens if you have cavity fillings or a metal plate in your body?
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
What about wireless Tasers?
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
This unit collects energy from the ambient electric fields using an on-board 'reverse Tesla Coil,' which in turn charges a large, on-board capacitor bank. The capacitors then drive a DC motor connected to one of the wheels, providing motive effort for the machine.
I wonder how much ambient electricity can be captured in a large city as an alternate means of powering an electric car?
The words "Lightning" and "laptop" in the same article... I think I will pass. Who cares if it's high voltage, high frequency. ITS LIGHTNING! Plus 800W is a bit overkill for a laptop eh?
The game.
How long does it take to heat up a burritto?
Isn't this the basic idea behind a microwave oven?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
May I dream of wireless laptop power? Sounds like a testicle taser to me. Don't taze me bro!
I don't know how I'd feel about EMW's strong enough to power laptops, lightbulbs, etc passing through me constantly. I'd feel as if I was in a microwave oven...
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800 Watts per 5 meter = 160 Joules/second*meter ! J/s*m ! how fun
Yes, you can. But I have it already. It's called a battery.
FYI: Power laws means square of the distance
60W at 2m > ? at 5m.
Well, 5/2 = 2.5 distance ratio.....so
60*2.5*2.5 = 375
So 375W at 5m is what the article should *really* be comparing the new system to. A two-fold increase isn't as exciting at a ten-fold, though, is it?
Aren't there many stories of farmers who would set up antennas to steal power by induction from high voltage lines that run across their fields?
Eschew Obfuscation
Even a 100 years or so later, the man's idea are still way ahead of the curve! Nonwithstanding of the whole "cracking the earth in half with a bomb" and "portable earthquake machine" claims, of course. Then again, maybe in another 100...
A square meter of earth's surface (at least in the tropics) probably gets more than 800W of power wirelessly, at least during summer daytime, entirely free of cost. The problems have been in building efficient and cheap receivers.
and they weren't able to get enough power to make it really worthwhile. They concluded that it was possible but that you'd need a really large rig to get worthwhile amounts of power and that such a rig would be easily detectable.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
A: Never will happen on a large scale. Too easy to "Steal" power when transmitted openly. I dare you to try and tap a power line without permission and see what happens (Provided you don't end up bacon). Hell you can go to jail for using an open wireless access point without permission, imagine you LED lights at Christmas accidentally tapping some transmitted power. Remember the whole static electricity debate? Remember one of the biggest arguments was how to bill for it?
B: Over-the-air transmission of damn near anything tends to fall into the FCC's court. Yeah like we really want them running a power grid. Their too busy trying to start a revenue stream via fines.
C: Until they can 'protect' that energy from being used by unauthorized sources it will never get any investment capital to get it up and running on a large scale. All that it would take is some miscreant to walk into the transmission field, drop a grounder of some sort and kill the power. Just wait till a kid with two forks and ADHD somehow creates a 10k degree plasma arc and burns himself. Hell I've seen office building getting sued for static discharge injuries now. The building next to me sprays the carpet every night as a result of 'an injury'.
D: The next duck that flys in the wrong direction will no longer be blamed on TVs, Radio, Microwaves, Cell Phones, Pornograph, HARP, or day time programming but rather power transmissions screwing up mother nature's compass. Environmentalists will find some wayward owl to block this. Perhaps a misguided 3 toed sloth navigating across an ocean due to power transmission. Hell how often do we hear about crap happening to people who live under power lines. This strikes me as a dead end.
I wish all these egg-heads would focus on practical, immediate, and needed science. Yes! we can confirm there is a black hole in the center of the galaxy! Yes! we found the Higgs Boson. Great! can you feed the homeless guy tonight with that info? No? Grow food in a desert? Ahh. Ohh CO2 on a planet a long ways away, do anything with all the grant money that can help us here on Earth? Though so. I'd rather spend a billion dollars getting to Mars. At the very least if there's no life there we could mine the hell out of it and store our nuke waste in a very deep hole there... Perhaps put a nice UMAX prison there for lifers. No chance of escape when you think about it...
I'm all for theoretical research and research for the sake of learning, but right now we have some serious fucking issues to tackle here on Earth now in the 21st century. 70+ year old power transmission ideaology that is easily killed in the court of commerce seems like a waste right now. I'd rather see brilliant minds doing brilliant things to help people here and now that can't be stymed by 4 simple examples above.
Billions to find a sub-atomic particle and only millions to feed people. Can we swap that M and B please? Even geeks need to eat.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
We finally have a method of male contraception that doesn't involve surgery, abstinence, or a woman's permission! I'll take that laptop, son. I'm too old for more kids!
Free Martian Whores!
The Tesla is a unit of magnetic flux already, 1 Tesla (T) is equivalent to 10,000 Gauss (G)
Input power: 3.6kW
Output power: 775W
Efficiency: 21.5%
Well... It's not that good. And just for 5 meters you lose more than 4 times the amount of power you transfer.
Yeah.. Its really cool and called a battery. Some last for hours!
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OK, so some aspects of this are pretty nifty... However, some basic math tells us that the efficiency (ratio of power consumed to "send" versus power "received" at destination) is hovering around 5:1 (20-22%) right now. Not exactly the world's greenest technology. I, for one, wouldn't want to wirelessly charge my battery-powered car using this method as I'd be paying for the wattage to power the transmitter, and losing a large chunk of it in the process. Not to mention the increase in greenhouse gas emissions due to higher generating capacity required to compensate for such losses should a system like this ever see wide-spread use. Unless efficiency climbs over, say 90-95%, people just won't want to pay the electric bill just to have the convenience of being able shed the power cord, nor will they want the pollution. The costs are just altogether too high.
-- "Why waste time learning when ignorance is instantaneous?" -- Hobbes (Calvin & Hobbes)
It matters not one whit whether they can push X watts Y meters. What matters is the the efficiency plug to socket. Anything over 25% is unlikely. Anything under 80% is wasteful.
And it's important to not cook anybody's eyeballs into 3-minute hard-boiled eggs in the process.
Experience with radar waves shows that any flux over 5 milliwatts per square centimeter is going to cause cataracts. Not good.
It is called your battery.
I would prefer a wireless vacuum cleaner. Maybe some of you don't participate in the art form known as vacuuming, but the power cord is a pain in the ass.
It's not so much aimed, in this case. If you want some serious directional juice, I have here somewhere plans for a microwave cannon using a cast-off transducer from a microwave oven. The original designer was waging a war against boom box cars and other sonic terrorists, and he built one of these things to fry equipment in passing cars and stereos on the other side of apartment walls. Even with the best focusing he could manage, though, there was enough scatter that he was forced to wear "Faraday cages" around his face and balls; he wore a hockey mask with some sort of mesh over his face and actually stuffed his balls into a tomato paste can to keep them from cooking.
I'm all for theoretical research and research for the sake of learning, but ...
But it was an accidental discovery:
And people thought electric blankets (and living near power lines) was bad...
(OK, so maybe the link with cancer is due to the sharpshooter fallacy, but still...)
I can't see how this is a practical or even a safe idea, really. I've been working in electronics my whole life, and around enough RF to know that high-power RF transmissions on almost any frequency pose health risks, as well as knowing that high-power RF transmitters aren't anywhere near the most power-efficient devices we've ever made, especially as the frequency of operation goes higher.
Another problem that any physics professor will tell you (after pointing out that "the boys" are not going to be in any more danger from that than they are from your cell phone, since neither would be likely to operate at a frequency at which the human body is resonant) is that any bit of metal can act as an antenna. All it takes is to have one piece of wire inside your laptop that happens to be the right resonant frequency for the power that is being transmitted and ZAP! I for one would not want my sensitive electronics that can be fried by static electricity in the wrong place to be anywhere near something like that.
I'm amazed that no one has pointed out that FM radios are 100,000 watt transmitters and we live next to those all the time.
As well as standing outside. Sometimes that summer daytime gets hot, and the winter daytime gets cold. As such wireless delivery of power while actually in something protecting us from the elements is still a worthwhile goal to pursue ;).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
What did my knockoff power mac and scanner ever do to you?!
The key to this story is the name of the lab... Its the friggin LIGHTNING laboratory! So no, this will not ever really be useful. This is just a directed static discharge.
...stuffed his balls into a tomato paste can to keep them from cooking.
Err, never mind.
Wanna pump 800W through the air? Pry the door off your microwave.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
he wore a hockey mask with some sort of mesh over his face and actually stuffed his balls into a tomato paste can to keep them from cooking.
Seems to me this fellow was just looking for an excuse to stick his scrotum in a tomato paste can. Did he chant master cylinder while doing so?
The original designer was waging a war against boom box cars and other sonic terrorists
So bathing everybody else with RF was an acceptable countermeasure? Who was the terrorist here?
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
The good news is your laptop is truly wireless. The bad news is your balls are the size of watermelons.
This is scalar wave technology eg non hertzian wavez and is point to point , so your body recive the waves unless tuned to , this making them safe. and its non herzian so it dosent vibrate molecules, like a microwave. here is the evidence of much research and u can buy a small kit online.
http://merlib.org/node/4755
Wow! Extracts electricity from the atmosphere, eh? Don't tell me it was invented by John Galt.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Tesla's original idea was to use the Earth's resonant frequencies to wirelessly transmit power from space based transmitters (e.g. PV cells) to terrestrial electrical devices.
Inexpensive wireless power would be available for everyone -- with the initial development, implementation, and maintenance costs possibly covered by some form of world tax.
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Look at the transfer efficiency: they're using a 3.6 kW transmitter to power a mere 775 watt load.
At distances beyond ten meters, even steam engines have better efficiency. When you consider the best efficiency they had was 38%, and most power plants are about 33% efficient, they need a considerable improvement for this to be practical. By way of comparison, the typical cable delivery system is about 90% efficient and doesn't have the somewhat undesirable property of setting nearby electronics on fire.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I have been following "new" energy for years. Every "new" energy story is a mystery novel with the last half removed.
1. Big announcement.
2. Impressive Demo.
4. Denunciation by "mainstream science" (Second Law of Thermodynamics, etc explained again)
5. ????
6. Never hear anything else about it ever again good or bad.
It's called a battery.
Mine works well. Seldom, if EVER, do I want to sit somewhere without power and use a computer.
If I'm camping, the computer is a rarity, only to check in via cell modem with family.
Otherwise, I have time to power the laptop enough for 100 percent charge, and another 2.5 hours.
--Toll_Free
A future without batteries - no need to charge phones or MP3 players, or even electric cars. No lost phone chargers, no running out of power sockets. Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner demonstrated a Wireless Energy Resonant Link as he spoke at the annual Intel developers forum in San Francisco yesterday.
Rattner demonstrated this by causing his ears to light up at 60 watts of power a yard from a power transmitter operated by his assistant Igor. Only four journalists were incinerated when the power earthed through them from his fingertips.
Rattner reassured us that pumping kilowatts of power around the home through magnetic induction power is absolutely harmless. "The human body is not affected by magnetic fields," he said as one journalist with a pacemaker collapsed and another with a knee replacement watched his leg catch fire. "There's no danger whatsoever from it, any more than there is from mobile phones cooking your brain, microwave leakage blinding you, chemical waste unraveling all the DNA in your balls or statistical clusters of kids with cancer wherever high-tension power lines run overhead. Asbestos and thalidomide were horribly slandered in their day too."
"Of course, Nikola Tesla did it first in 1899," said enthusiast Albert Tedious-Anorak, 54, of Little Boring. "I detailed this at length on Wikipedia, but they refused to believe the value of my revelations on this matter due to a conspiracy of Edison fans amongst the site administrators."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The background EM field is very, very small, and much smaller than a few mW. Just because the transmitter does 50kW doesn't mean you're getting any substantial percentage of it.
The proposal in the OP for power transmission is incredibly dangerous for real-world use.
Oh crap the cat was laying on the power transmitter...
Their power source is 3.6 kW to produce 0.78 kW... that's roughly 20% efficient.
In the electrical world, I know that sounds like horseshit. But look at it this way... they have effectively created a wireless power transmission method that is on par with the internal combustion engine.
And, the kid's toys will stop when you unplug the transmitter.
Some of these batteries should be labeled as "flashlight/camera use only."
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
You can also use the "near field" by building an antenna that cancels in all directions. There are fields near it, from which you can grab power. But the waves don't propagate away from it.
It's similar to the region just outside the surface of a prism that has a light beam doing total internal reflection. The fields extend beyond the surface of the prism but can't propagate away. But put another prism close enough (essentially touching in the case of visible light) and they'll couple across so the light beams away inside it. Use a wavelength on the order of the distance you want to send the power or longer and you can do the same thing.
Not too useful for long-distance transmission, of course.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A lot of toothbrushes now use inductive charging. My electric tea kettle does as well, and it is high gain. This means the contact is well sealed. The juice moves over the insulator. No unsealed points.
Still, it would be cool to have a sort of recharging zone -- a table, say, by the front door where you could just toss all your mobile stuff to get a wireless boost. It might even stat broadcasting only when a device is there. (Unlike a transformer, which sucks a little juice like a little vampire all day long waiting for someone to plug him -- or her -- in.)
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
The atmosphere has a considerable potential gradient across it. If you put up a raised, insulated, conductor, it will become charged to the average potential at the elevations it runs through. When it runs for tens of miles it will also have enough capacitance to store a considerable charge, able to draw a considerable arc to a ground.
Unfortunately the available current is so low that it doesn't pay to string one to collect power. And it is subject to wild variations in the amount of power it provides depending on weather. (Extremely wild, when you consider that it's a lightning rod miles long... B-) )
Some people have experimented with down-converting it using a buck converter built with a "doorknob" capacitor for the input filter and relaxation oscillator's capacitive component, a spark plug for the switch (also a voltage regulator and the oscilator's negative-resistance element), an automotive spark coil for a step-down transformer, and an ordinary power supply diode for the rectifier. They claim to pull enough power to gradually charge small batteries from collection wires they string up on their property.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The MIT group is not proposing to use omnidirectional (or directional) radiative energy transfer, which indeed would radiate most of the energy into the environment, and only a small fraction into the receiver, and even that could be eliminated if something (e.g. a person) walks between the source and receiver.
They are proposing non-radiative resonant energy transfer, in which both the source and receiver are resonant oscillators at a particular frequency coupled via the near field (non radiatively), and hence preferentially transfer energy compared to anything else that is not resonant (with a long lifetime) at the same frequency. Furthermore, they are using resonators that only couple through their magnetic fields (the electric fields are largely within capacitors inside the device), which further reduces absorption of energy by the environment (because most materials are non-magnetic, energy dissipation is largely via ohmic heating, i.e. by the electric fields). Because of this, almost all of the losses take the form of resistive heating in the devices themselves; only a miniscule fraction is dissipated in the surrounding environment (e.g. a person).
Of course, this being Slashdot, it's not surprising that most posters never RTFAed and post nonsense "it's just like an inductive transformer" (nope, those don't use resonance) or "it's just like an antenna" (nope, that is radiative transfer) or "Tesla looked at this a century ago" (nope, people like Tesla were concerned with power transfer over long distances, which necessitates radiative mechanisms and hence low efficiency).
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
World hunger is actually caused by politics. America's Midwest produces (or is capable of producing) enough food to feed the entire world.
Not any more.
Politics and economics have led to a situation where the US is now a net IMPORTER of food.
(Thank the nice politicians for the inheritance tax: Family farms are a thing of the past, now that every new generation (and the last couple old ones) have to sell off enough land to give about half the value of it - as land for urban development - to Uncle Sam when mom and pop pass away.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
your coal fired laptop is ready.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Imagine the applications of this if we had a sizable fleet of electric cars in use.
Place chargers near congested intersections in big cities. Cars would be getting charged while waiting at red lights.
Parking garages for large office buildings would charge all of the cars parked in them for the day.
Others?
When I was in the Canadian Military we had a sat dish we could hook up to our PABX in the field, and it stated in the manual that you should not stand in front of the thing when it was operational or the transmitted signal from it "might cause sterility" or something to that effect. It had a hazard sticker on it that should have warned people to stay clear. Try as we might we couldn't get people to stop walking in front of it (even if we put up a tape barrier, people would just step over it rather than walking the 8 feet or so required to go around it).
In the end I had to sketch up a sign of someone with their balls being blown off their body and large letters warning "RADIATION HAZARD - SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR CHANCE TO EVER HAVE KIDS" and post it over top of the dish where it was clearly visible. That and the tape finally got people to stay out of the hazardous area.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Cell phones, cordless phones, and remotes might also be good to charge via this method as well.
Heck, making AA, AAA, C, and D sized "batteries" that just receives "wireless power" from the "wireless transmitter" would let you power some of those kids toys for as long as you have the wireless transmitter plugged in. That would be much better than running down the batteries really quickly and then either having to recharge or get new ones.
You don't need 800W to charge a couple of small batteries. The "problem" that you describe is already solved with inductive power. Most electric tooth brushes with batteries work on this principle.
He was an RF Vigilante, in response to the Sonic Terrorists. Since he published his design to a select group, he was actually trying to form an RF Posse. I thought about jumping on my high horse and riding out with him, but then I recalled the gonad pain of a saddle and thought better of it. It didn't bother him because he was armored with the tomato paste can, apparently.
Couldn't give you one, anyway: it was strictly old school, on printed-and-stapled paper and shared via snail mail with a stamp. This was only a few years ago, though, not pre-Internet.
I don't think many people spend significant time sitting right next to a TV transmission tower. WHo know, maybe some of or cancer deaths may be related to EM spectrum energy. That would be a tough study to do with people.
As far as distance goes, using your laptop, on you lap, while receiving that kind of energy. No thank you sir!. Let someone else be the guinea pig. Some of that http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/12/10/181229.shtml#energy will be soaked up in unintended areas.
ANy EE majors out there care to do the calculations of what kind of power would a person experience at 200 meters from a 50,000 watt station? I don't remember enough physics anymore.
could help take EV's mainstream.
The Nevada Lightning Lab article says, "Far fields are mostly radiative, and drop off linearly with distance." This isn't true. Once the radiator's size becomes small compared to the distance (the definition of "far field"), an electromagnetic field's intensity declines proportional to the square of distance. I bring this up because there are some very basic physical rules that affect all radiation-coupled energy systems, and it's misleading for people to make these kinds of claims, especially for a new technology likely to be marketed.
The 1/r^2 rule applies to nearly all fields -- electromagnetic, gravitational, even sound in air. People who makes these kinds of claims are either ignorant or are intent on selling you something that doesn't exist. Or both.
This must be why so much of the artwork we see depicting the future shows people wearing spandex, nylon, rubber, leather, or vinyl. You have to wear non-conductive clothing to prevent sparking!
I hope this comment is well received... I could have moderated instead!
Persecutors will be violated!
Of course, this being Slashdot, it's not surprising that most posters never RTFAed and post nonsense "it's just like an inductive transformer" (nope, those don't use resonance) or "it's just like an antenna" (nope, that is radiative transfer) or "Tesla looked at this a century ago" (nope, people like Tesla were concerned with power transfer over long distances, which necessitates radiative mechanisms and hence low efficiency).
It's a pity that your handwave of the "Tesla looked at this a century ago" opinion falls so flat by proving that you, yourself, did not RTFA, or you would have seen the third paragraph of the article, which states "Intriguing as this might be, we have no plans to pursue intellectual property for this discovery. The concept of using resonant coils to wirelessly couple power was patented by Nikola Tesla over 100 years ago." Shooting your argument in the foot by demonstrating that you are a member of the population you rail against does little for your credibility.
There is a low tech solution that can span millions of kilometers, its called light. How about a LED source combined with a 41% efficient composite solar panel on the recieving end? Porbably more efficient and zero electromagnetic 'pollution' Start work on saving the planet, we don't need these gadgets
One of the fascinating things about tuned antennas is that they can be said to warp space.
If you think about it, loading an antenna creates a virtual antenna that is *longer* in one dimension at it's resonant frequency.
If you think about what is happening with the surface area of the antenna wire, (which stays the same size) it's actually pretty weird.
Great, Now where did I leave those sharks... ps. does anyone know how far Tesla himself got?
We tuned our VLF 15-25khz xmitter by peaking glowing disconnected fluorescent tubes.
http://www.hawkins.pair.com/nss.shtml
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
I was talking about the MIT group (who explicitly discuss the differences between what they are doing and what Tesla considered), not the group in the article here. And you're right that Tesla also looked at non-radiative schemes for very short distances, e.g. Tesla coils, but at the time of Tesla most of the interest was in long-range power delivery (which never worked out because of the problems with radiative transfer, and in any case such schemes were supplanted by the wired electrical grid).
Tesla coils involve large electric fields between the source and receiver device, and so (a) are quite different from the magnetically-coupled resonators the MIT group proposes and (b) are impractical for the short-distance power-delivery applications considered here because they can dissipate too much energy into the environment.
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
I don't think many people spend significant time sitting right next to a TV transmission tower. WHo know,
maybe some of or cancer deaths may be related to EM spectrum energy. That would be a tough study to do with
people.
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/164/6/538
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
That is either one of the most informative posts I've seen on Slashdot or the most brazen piece of BS I've ever seen. Most technology topics I know enough to tell if what someone is saying makes sense. But what you are saying is so far out there I honestly can't tell if you are making this stuff up. Kudos either way.
Actually, no.
Phased arrays of antennas can "direct energy" such that the interference points of the multiple waveforms reinforce and suppress in a specific pattern, but they cannot direct the energy merely to a single "point."
And, you are still not directing "all the energy" along that single point. Far from it, you are losing plenty of energy; it is still being sent through the dead zones, even if the waveforms from the multiple antennas are having the net effect of canceling each other. The energy is expended either (a) in the transmission medium or (b) upon whatever they reach when they deconverge past the cancellation point.
If it would go just a little longer... we could build solar power stations in orbit and get that energy down here.
It would be incredibly easy and cheap to install gigantic solar sails in zero gravity.
The reason Tesla was forced to drop the project what because J.P. Morgan pulled funding because he realized he couldn't stick a meter on it and thus charge people for it.
But, IMHO, wireless power has a lot of potential when it comes to electric vehicles. The battery is the limiting factor so if the car doesn't need one and is able to pull power out of the ether, that would be a great reason to do it. You'd probably still want the battery as a backup for when you venture outside the range of the transmission system.
Then if you take it a step further, trucking is a big reason why electric vehicles aren't going to be a big deal. But if you can set up a transmission system on all Interstates and designated truck routes and augment the local travel with traditional diesel power. That make a lot of sense
Of course you HAVE to use nuclear power to make it work. Passive power generation ain't going to cut it.
Easy! And I bet it can reach more than 5 meters.
-><- no
Who HONESTLY needs wireless power, that rechargable batteries can't provide?
charging a defibrillator, or anything you want inside your body, but not having enough battery power to last a lifetime (also maybe a embedded cellphone)
And places where size seriously matters, perhaps a microbot that does surgery.
I hate wires as well, but just hope it won't fried my balls. It's way too much wireless stuff around us in these days and nobody can tell for sure how it might affect on us.
Laugh. It's funny.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
... if I remember correctly, Tesla's wireless transmission of power was based on the conductive properties of the ionosphere and earth with the atmosphere acting as a dielectric - or in other words, using the earth + air + ionosphere as a giant capacitor. His theory was that you could charge the earth using this capacitance and retrieve the energy from any other point on the earth with nearly 70% efficiency.
Thanks for that. I'd never heard the explanation and that makes a lot of sense. (Might be interesting to look at it as a concentric sphere resonant cavity, too...)
That explains his building devices with large rounded (to avoid arcs) structures on top and referring to them as "elevated capacitances": He was trying for capacitive coupling to a conductor above him, as opposed to emitting/absorbing electromagnetic waves from the electric dipole field between the "capacitive hat" and ground and/or the current in the structure between them.
= = =
All of which is not germane to my previous post, which was trying to explain the "can spot weld with power collected by an unconnected transmission line" in terms of collected static electricity.
It would be interesting to look at the waveforms on such a line to see how much of the power was DC from static collection and how much / what frequencies AC.
Other potential sources would be Tesla-style capacitive coupling to any excursions in the ionosphere and acting as an antenna for any (long-wave) electromagnetic stuff in the vicinity. (Construction crane operators working within a mile or so of AM radio transmitters with a crane boom even remotely near a quarter-wavelength for the signal have been known to be knocked out when getting on/off their vehicles and completing the circuit at the base of the crane-as-antenna.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
um i dont dip the whole thing in water do you
Yes, you may.
Sig this!
"*** Not measured -- arcing hazard too great at close separation." In this case, "close separation" means 4m away, so don't put this in your room. Forget about RF radiation, worry about the fire hazard!
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I think everybody is missing the point. Actually 800W at 5 meters is enough to install it in any house. We don't seek to replace every single cable, just the ones which bother us. I can see a hybrid solution for houses, in which you can plug the devices that you "leave there" (i mean nonportable devices such as TVs) and just use the wireless for laptops, phones and such things. Also if you wire all the house and install one "wireless outlet" in every room you should get enough power for most things. I can perfectly see such solutions in the houses.
Yes, you can do this, but why bother?
If you actually read Tesla's paper, you find that what he had in mind was powering a small town with a setup where each house had an attic full of antennas to power a 40 watt bulb. The efficiency would be low, and would require excessive power at the generation end. But it would be wireless power transmission.
The basic problem is that you power not only tuned power receivers, but just about anything with a coil anywhere nearby.
Point to point power transmission via microwaves works better. There have been a few demo systems, mostly for point to point power transmissions between islands. It's been tried successfully between Hawaiian islands, on Reunion Island, and between Japanese islands. Of course, it's been discussed for solar power satellites. So far, nobody has found a commercial justification for doing it, but it works.
Wireless power, you still need to be around a live power source. Nuclear batteries are the best option, plug in and last for life. The only problem being the batteries may outlast the device by a n factor... Didn't the machines in Terminator future run on nuclear batteries or something?
Where in TFA did they discuss the MIT group's research in depth?
I hope those things don't malfunction...wonder what 800V would do to a persons internal organs...
Even with the best focusing he could manage, though, there was enough scatter that he was forced to wear "Faraday cages"
Should have used a MASER. And there's an XKCD reference in there somewhere.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
And you're right that Tesla also looked at non-radiative schemes for very short distances, e.g. Tesla coils,
Tesla also looked at non-radiative resonance-based schemes for long distances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_energy_transfer#Tesla_patents
You could at least learn to spell the man's name correctly - his name was Nikola, not Nicola!
Secondly, why is this considered news? 800W at 5 meters is ridiculous, Tesla himself managed to transfer much more at much longer distances more than a hundred years ago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_energy_transfer!
Hate to break it to you, but you're bathed in much more than a few millitwatts of EM every second of every day.
My new favourite unit!
xterm -n 8
Phase 1 - transmit power wirelessly. Phase 3 - Profit. I believe Phase 2 - prevent anything and anyone that comes between the transmitter and receiver from being fried - will prove crucial. And I speak with authority, having several times dealt with Microwave Oops disasters in Sim City 2000.
PUSHING? WHAT? As Churchill said, "You can trust the Americans to do the right thing ... after they've tried everything else."
Tesla invented that too, but his goal was COLLECTING (and converting) EM etc FOR FREE!
StevenJ wrote:
"Tesla coils involve large electric fields between the source and receiver device, and so (a) are quite different from the magnetically-coupled resonators the MIT group proposes and (b) are impractical for the short-distance power-delivery applications considered here because they can dissipate too much energy into the environment."
There are of course circumstances where a magnetically-coupled resonator would dissipate *far* more energy into the environment. For instance, any sheet of metal will dissipate energy from a magnetically-coupled resonator, but not from an electrically-coupled one.
Bottom line: In any real-world environment, you will find *plenty* of objects that dissipate energy from both types of approaches.
Not scientists. Just some guys with a TV show and one manly, manly mustache between them.
I can't watch that show anymore because I end up screaming at the TV because they've made some CRITICAL, SIMPLE error in setting up an experiment.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Been reading alot of Tesla lately.
Seems he was convinced his method of power transmission was through the Earth, with the aerial device being only a return trip at a fraction of the energy. He states that he discovered that when sending a pulse with his mechanisms, the response was actually traveling at c^2 and was practically loss less.
He perfected everything at Colorado Springs with funding from the big boys of industry and then started construction on the NY world communications tower.
He understood that with his resonator and another like it in France or perhaps England, he could transmit data, voice or images, all instantly, merely by modulating the exciting coil after charging the resonator. The first tower in NY was finished, somewhat behind schedule, but the others never built. The financiers were also invested in power poles and metals used in cables, they couldn't allow Tesla to succeed or those investments would be lost. Tesla explains that with his resonator, as a byproduct of the fact that it interacts with the earth, he creates a standing wave of surging energy on the conducting layers of the planet. A pair of electrodes, one at a peak and one at a valley of the standing wave allowed the appropriately tuned receiver to pick up communications and data as well as free electricity without all the cost of power lines, poles, transformers, etc. He understood the benefits quite clearly, he didn't understand the obtuseness of old money and a fixed plan for their investments that couldn't be deviated from.
I wonder if he also succeeded in his ultimate dream of creating an energy weapon so powerful that it would make war senseless, as it would be impossible to use armies or missiles to attack a nation protected by his device. If he told JP Morgan about it, it would definitely cause him to drop all funding, as he and his friends were thoroughly invested in the Military Industrial Complex... no war, no profits.