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Wireless Power Consortium Pushes For Standard
Slatterz writes "We've already heard about wireless power before, but now we're a step closer to throwing away our power cables and chargers. A consortium of eight companies has launched an
initiative to develop a wireless power standard. The drive was announced at the first Wireless Power Consortium conference at the Hong Kong Science Park yesterday. Most consumer electronic devices require a different charger, and the resulting tangle of wires and bulky devices is 'ugly, frustrating and inconvenient to use,' the group said. 'Wireless power charging takes away the need for wires and connectors. You simply drop your mobile phone, game device, electric shaver on the charging station and the battery is recharged,' explained Satoru Nishimura, senior manager at Sanyo."
Im not an expert with this kind of thing by any means but isn't there a chance that it could cause damage to more advanced devices? anyone have any ideas how they get around that?
Can I put one of these on the floor of my garage and charge my car when I park at night?
putting your laptop on top of the charger would probably scramble the hard drive.
With SSD that won't be a problem.
There are other advantages.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Ideally, bugs like cancer-causing levels of radiation will be worked out before it goes into production.
I sure hope so, but some things can easily slip by quality control, and I would think this could be easier in wireless development due to possible difficulties in testing, and a lack of knowing "exactly" what causes cancer in the first place.
And it is also scary how quality control's quality itself seems to be decreasing drastically.
Umm, no let's not plug it in.
In time this can be improved above 80% efficiency. It's not about "may as well plug it in", it's also about space constraints, plugs, etc. This can remove the need for a lot of wiring and is not a new technology by far.
People have used mice (not the animals) to do this for years.
Not to mention this could force standardizing of connections thus disabling companies from having proprietary connectors to connect things.
Shaver's plug gets bust? Would be nice to replace the plug and not the whole damn thing, etc. This bypasses that entirely.
For my Masters Thesis, I designed a wireless powering system for a fully implanted bio-monitoring device for a mouse running around, untethered, in a cage. Now, a mouse is actually quite small, so our implant had to be about the size of a U.S. dime (actually, a bit smaller). The mouse was never more than a few cm away from the cage floor, but could move around, stand up, roll over, etc., so we could not make the powering system very "directed" in nature. As a result, our optimized average power coupling efficiency we near 0.08% (Page 25, specs on Page 95), which was actually pretty good for the application. It did mean that our implant needed to be extremely low-power, however, involving all sorts of power supply optimizations (Chapter 3), MEMS sensors, and the like.)
The problem with trying to power your wireless devices anywhere in a room is similar, due to the fact that you can move around and change the orientation of your devices. As the ratio of power-receiving-antenna to "cage" is even lower, you are likely looking at even lower power efficiencies. Yes, you can perform all sorts of fractal antenna optimizations and the like, but, if you want to be able to receive power anywhere in the room, then you are limited by the laws of physics: If your powering system covers the whole room, your efficiency is limited by the simple ratio of the area of your receiving antenna in the plane parallel to the floor (or wherever you place your powering system) to the area of the powering antenna itself.
The recent demos of wireless power by Intel and others have all involved highly directed powering antennae, where moving the receiver even a small amount cuts off the power supply. Directed power does have its uses, however. Imagine medical implants that can be powered in a short time by placing a directed antenna on your skin each morning, or even wearing a battery pack on your belt with a directed antenna to power a device with a built in radio communicator. No (highly infectable) wires penetrate the skin, no surgery is necessary to replace batteries that run low, and, even in the worst cases, you should still be able to remove the battery back for a time to perform certain functions (exercising, bathing) without losing device functionality.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
On the other hand, MIT has managed to produce wireless power at 75% and even 90% efficiency, either of which would be more efficient than your laptop's power pack.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
Many people leave their charging transformers plugged in, even when not charging their appliance.
Since most of these chargers are cheap, they are not only highly inefficient when charging (how hot does your laptop power supply get?), but also consume power when not doing anything useful.
Would need to factor these things in to properly judge efficiency of near-field charging, which can get above 80% if I remember correctly...
So tell me - how far are your mouse, keyboard, and monitors from your desk?
The perfect use for this, in my mind, would be to have it built into your PC case. PC case sits under your desk, and monitors, mouse, keyboard, speakers are all just free standing. Awesome for LAN parties (assuming separate power transmitters don't interfere with each other), the worst thing about moving a computer (or even having one set up somewhere) is the spaghetti nest of wires tying it together. Of course, I'd probably duct-tape some tinfoil lining into my lucky rocketship underpants...
As for efficiency, I'd presume that the efficiency they're talking about is just that of the wireless transmission. There'd be a transformer at each side to get the voltages correct so it's still going to be less efficient overall than your power brick. A more apt comparison would be the 90% @ 3 feet compared to the power loss over the wires from the power brick to the device.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
That'd certainly be a nice start. They've come some way to that with standardizing the AC side of two-strand power cables (the kind everyone uses for localized power packs, one power brick that can take from 110-250 volts input and a different wall-side cable for each region). The hard bit would be convincing all the different device manufacturers (mobile phone makers I'm looking at you, stop inventing new and terribad ways to plug a handful of wires into your phones!) that they can make do with one of a small number of universal connectors.
Also, the microchip thingy isn't necessary - DC devices regulate how much current they draw when given their desired input voltage, the amperage on a power pack is just the maximum that can provide. If the voltage is the same and the polarity of the plug is the same (and the plug fits, obviously) then you can use any power pack which can provide equal to or greater than the device's peak current.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
What if it turns on for a very short interval every so often and detects whether there is a power drain. The change in the drop in voltage across the unit gives a clue as to the state of need. Essentially it becomes a sampling frequency and threshold decision problem.