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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.)"
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?
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?
Yes. Yes we do - Or at least we could with some sensible investments. Our (the US) power transmission infrastructure needs an overhaul - I'd rather spend tax $$ on that than several of the things they're going toward now. But, if we adopted sensible energy policies, there's no good reason that we can't have electricity to just throw away.
I'll agree that throwing $$ away in one place is no justification for throwing it away in another, but a better power (and data?) transmission system nationwide with upgraded power production (nuclear, wind, cleaner coal, etc) IMO is not remotely a waste.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Yes, you can. But I have it already. It's called a battery.
The point wasn't that investment in infrastructure is a waste.
Wireless power transmission is wasteful. Between the inverse square law and eddy currents induced in everything remotely conductive between point A and point B, wireless power would lose a huge percentage of the useful energy generated.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Wrong way. The power should decrease with the inverse of the square. 2/5 = 0.4, 0.4^2 = 0.16.
So 60*0.16 = 9.6W at 5m.
That's an increase of nearly a hundredfold.
Though I am not an electrical engineer / physicist and I don't know if the inverse square law is necessarily applicable.
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!
If you want to conserve power, wireless is not the way to go - it is always going to be inherently lossy, because (a) air will never be an ideal medium (not that current wiring is, but we're getting better and better with low-resistance conductor material) and (b) if you have to distribute it from an antenna, you necessarily waste a vast amount of your energy that will not be picked up by the receiving antenna.
The only way to get around (b) is to have a perfectly tuned, ideal directional antenna and a perfectly tuned, ideal receiving antenna pointed exactly at each other for the entire time you are functioning. Any deviation from these will result in power loss.
You have your choice: energy efficiency OR omnidirectional transmission. The two are mutually exclusive. Plus, I along with many, many others would not like to have my reproductive organs anywhere near such a device.
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 think you're missing the big picture.
World hunger is actually caused by politics. America's Midwest produces (or is capable of producing) enough food to feed the entire world. The problem is getting it to the people who need it. That problem is caused by corrupt leaders and goverments. Even when we do get it to the nation in need, the government uses it to feed their armies or sells it off. The hungry stay hungry.
As a replacement technology for our current transmission and distribution system, yes, wireless isn't a good idea.
But what about a power station on the Moon that could beam it's product wirelessly back to Earth? Or what about a smaller satellite? Sure the whole, death ray from space scenario might scare you, but a power station in geosync orbit that wirelessly transmits a couple GWatts of power to a receiver station in the Caribbean or a North American desert wouldn't be so bad.
As for the particle physics, well, yeah. Perhaps understanding those particles will lead to something useful.
Plus, I along with many, many others would not like to have my reproductive organs anywhere near such a device.
Wait... did you just invoke Rule # 34?
The only way to get around (b) is to
But that is exactly the wrong way to think about things! If you only think about why it won't work, you'll never make anything new!
For example, you could say here: in order to get high efficiencies you would have to sit in a waveguide with nearly perfect reflectors on both ends. That could lead to buildings designed as such waveguides, etc. With new materials being developed with negative indexes of refraction at useful wavelengths, impossible waveguides are just more expensive.
not like to have my reproductive organs anywhere near such a device
Similarly, the obvious solution is to remove your reproductive organs at the door! Schnick!
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
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.
Wireless power is only suitable for everything that is portable. Portable electronics require chargeable batteries. Chargeable batteries are also a wasteful.
Chargeable batteries also generate heat, are harmful to the environment when disposed and can cause fires and serious injury to the point of death when they explode.
There is no point not to use wireless power.
Here be signatures
Wasteful, but extremely useful for certain purposes. Most electric toothbrushes are a perfect example, if solved slightly differently - you don't want unsealed electrical points on a device that gets wet in normal use. Any other sealed device that needs charging could possibly benefit from this.
...stuffed his balls into a tomato paste can to keep them from cooking.
Err, never mind.
Rumor has it that military RF technicians used to irradiate themselves with the maximum PEL(permissible exposure level) of RF radiation to sterilize themselves for the weekend.
It's a well-known fact that eyeballs and testicles are first parts of the human body to fry under high-power RF exposure.
I don't think that anyone is saying that wireless power isn't wasteful - It's inherently lossy. The issue at hand is whether the power loss using wireless sufficiently offsets the waste associated with other transmission methods (batteries in landfills) or compensates through added convenience for the user.
I mentioned an infrastructure upgrade because we could greatly increase our available piped power while generating considerably less waste than our currently available portable power alternatives.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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.
But it would allow lazy US bums to not get out of the coach to change the plug!
"As seen on TV!"
Wasteful, but extremely useful for certain purposes. Most electric toothbrushes are a perfect example, if solved slightly differently - you don't want unsealed electrical points on a device that gets wet in normal use. Any other sealed device that needs charging could possibly benefit from this.
So you have a wireless power transmitter in the bathroom integrated in the normal electrical outlet. What powered bathroom devices could we power this way? Tooth brushes, razors, vanity mirrors, shower radios, all sorts of kids toys, and that adult bath toy the battery powered vibrator.
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.
Wireless power transmission is wasteful.
I disagree. We have found ways to transmit power efficiently, for example, parabolic antennas and phase arrays. We could even design the systems (assuming they have enough antenna placed in the space and the wavelength is small enough) so that the transmissions mostly avoid certain places (eg, you, the interior of your TV set, etc). Having said that, I don't see a compelling reason to have substantial power provided via wireless in a personal space. If the system is hacked, it can cause considerable property damage and bodily harm.
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.
Wireless power is only suitable for everything that is portable. ...
There is no point not to use wireless power.
Setting aside concerns about increasing environmental EMF, what would wireless power offer other than convenience?
Wireless power transmission is more wasteful than conventional methods of power delivery.
Your points about batteries and their ill effects are right on, which is why fuel cell technology is getting a lot of focus in the R&D world.
On another note, why would we create infrastructure that could interfere with neural interfaces? Even if we are only talking about the helmet style esp game controllers that are coming to market, why would we saturate our environment with electricity when the next gen of interfaces rely on reading minute electrical impulses?
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 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
As opposed to non-radioactive radiation?
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.
and that adult bath toy the battery powered vibrator.
Oh, pure genius! I never even *considered* taking adult toys into the bath! Sign me up for your newsletter!
Rumor has it that military RF technicians used to irradiate themselves with the maximum PEL(permissible exposure level) of RF radiation to sterilize themselves for the weekend.
Let me be the first to say: You're doing it wrong!
Jesus Christ..... if there was ever a time when that meme was appropriate......
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
As opposed to non-radioactive radiation?
Yes, non-radioactive like the radiation of heat from the ductwork in your house on a cold day, or from the side of an older toaster. Perhaps non-radioactive like the radiation of visible light from a fluorescent or incandescent light bulb. Radiation is just transmission of energy. It is not always due to radioactive decay.
Isn't this how smart cards work already?
;)
I thought that smart cards had a tiny chip on them with no power supply, they get the energy to perform the transaction from the antenna built into the card when it's held over the point of sale device.
Which gives it just enough juice to perform the job at hand and then go back to sleep when the card it put away. So we already use it and need it to survive
Personally I welcome our new wireless power overlords......
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.
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
As TFA cleary states, far fields decrease in power linearly, not by the inverse square, to the distance. Wires also lose power linearly.
But why should you bother considering the actual problem and solution? You already know everything that can be known about electric transmission.
--
make install -not war
Or it could just be used for short range transmission, with wired transmission taking care of shorter ranges. It would be incredibly wasteful to wirelessly transmit electricity from a plant to everyone's home, but setting up small 5m radius bubbles within those homes might not be that much more wasteful than the hundreds of feet of wiring and cords that most American homes require anyway. And just imagine if we could do this with DC, eliminating the need for irritating (and very wasteful) adapters that just about everything requires now.
On a tangentially related note: cleaner coal, nuclear and wind are great and all, but can't we just start sticking solar panels on everything already? They've been around forever, they work great on top of space that isn't used anyway (like roofs), they cause virtually no pollution or other environmental issues once installed and the most common deployments are practically invisible. We could start by requiring new commercial construction to have solar paneling and giving tax credits (at or around %100 of the cost) for that as well as retrofitting current structures, using whatever excess power can be generated to reduce the power we need to generate with less clean methods. It's relatively cheap, easy, and uncontroversial.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Solutions are known to cause cancer in the state of California
By your logic, I believe everyone should drive around stretch hummers.
So what if it requires expensive infrastructure (far more road space) and is tremendously more inefficient. Everyone would be more comfortable and safer.
Clearly everyone should drive hummers as priuses also pollute and cause environmental damage in their creation.
Beyond that point, wireless power only makes sense in a few circumstances - namely when around something that is connected to the grid. You'll still need batteries, unless you expect planes, cars, parks, non-new age houses/cities, etc. to all have this wireless power.
And if you're talking about transmitting blanket wireless over entire cities...
1. It's tremendously inefficient. Physics will only allow it to be made so efficient, and that's still tremendously inefficient.
2. How will you keep track of who gets what energy? Oh yea, that's right, it's practically free, so there will be no worries.
3. Laptops and the like are getting much faster/more energy efficient. Even if this comes out tomorrow, it still won't be widely available for at least a decade. In the meantime, battery life will get better, so the impact won't be as great. Plugging in a computer at night isn't that big a deal.
4. We still haven't gotten high speed wireless yet. Wireless internet (802.11b) has been around for what, close to 9 years and we still haven't gotten anywhere close to providing 'free' or 'truly fast' internet, and coverage is still highly lacking - and wireless internet is relatively free and physics isn't against it.
If we developed cold fusion, it might be plausible. Of course when we develop such a plentiful energy source, we'll probably have developed a more efficient mobile power source, like fuel cells or http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/10/1821208 capacitors. Sorry to rain on your flying car. It'll be neat for certain applications, but I doubt it'll be something that important for laptops.
I am not an expert. If I am misled in something, please correct me.