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Nokia Developed Wireless Power-Harvesting Phones
Al writes "An engineer from Nokia's UK research labs says that the company is developing technology that can harvest ambient electromagnetic radiation to keep a cellphone going. The researcher says that his group is working towards a prototype that could harvest up to 50 milliwatts of power — enough to slowly recharge a phone that is switched off. He says current prototypes can harvest 3 to 5 milliwatts. It will require a wideband receiver capable of capturing signals from between 500 megahertz and 10 gigahertz — a range that encompasses many different radio communication signals. Other researchers have developed devices that can harvest more modest power from select frequencies. A team from Intel previously developed a compact sensor capable of drawing 6 microwatts from a 1.0-megawatt TV antenna 4.1 kilometers away."
Wake me up when it can harvest 1.21 gigawatts
Another great example as to how Tesla has shaped our future. Truly ahead of his time by leaps and bounds.
Crystal radio sets harvested enough power to drive an earphone-sized speaker.
In some circumstances, florescent light bulbs can draw enough power from a nearby power source to light up.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
And people have been known to "steal" power remotely from high power transmission lines in a way I don't recall (or understand).
And they said that Tesla was nuts. Jeez, just because he spent all his time at dinner calculating the volume of food on his plate, It doesn't mean he's crazy... Although that is pretty crazy...
"Harvesting" is cool and all, but what I've been wondering is why manufacturers haven't been putting solar panels in phones. Such as my Casio G-Shock watch I bought 3 years ago...it has solar panels built into the watch face and a rechargeable battery, and works fantastic. I was looking at the iPhone the other day and thinking they could probably do the same thing with the large surface area of the "face" of the phone. Seems like a logical, relatively easy addition if you ask me.
Won't that decrease signal range of cellphone towers? If all the phones in the vicinity power themselves from the tower's signal, that signal can't travel as far as before, leading to needing more towers per square mile, no?
> A team from Intel previously developed a compact sensor capable of drawing 6 microwatts from a 1.0-megawatt TV antenna 4.1 kilometers away.
Oh..... You mean the high def TV antenna.....
http://www.techonline.com/learning/techpaper/212902041
I do have to say the WISP project sounds neat. They're essentially RFID powered sensors.
http://www.seattle.intel-research.net/wisp/
Wouldn't this draw energy out of the radio signal, thus making it weaker? If this becomes popular in Los Angeles, will a radio station's not be able to broadcast as far because a million people are leeching power off it's transmitting power?
Of the novella Waldo, by Robert Heinlein.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Most of that power would be absorbed by some material, nearby concrete, or ground.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
They all work, they just don't cure the kind of cancer you have.
Sorry.
Shouldn't be too hard to harvest energy from changes of momentum and orientation, similar to how many mechanical watches have for years been able to wind themselves.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
When I was in college in the early 80s we built inductive loops to draw power from the local radio station. We drew enough power to light an incandescent bulb. The only problem was the radio station had remote power meters across their broadcast footprint, and we dropped their power levels significantly for the station to call the college. The funny thing was the college knew exactly what professor to call for this was done repeatedly through the semesters, and the radio station could get a pretty good reading on where the actual drop was coming from per their power readings.
10 seconds on high should be plenty
[...] 6 microwatts from a 1.0-megawatt TV antenna [...] Wow, how's that for an environmentally unfriendly record?
This will be much better than my corded power-harvesting phone.
"In some circumstances, florescent light bulbs can draw enough power from a nearby power source to light up." In that case, the nearby power is huge.
From the Slashdot summary: "A team from Intel previously developed a compact sensor capable of drawing 6 microwatts from a 1.0-megawatt TV antenna 4.1 kilometers away." Six microwatts from 1 megawatt is about right.
The estimate of "50 milliwatts" from ambient radiation to charge a cell phone is not. Remember that cell phones are generally inside buildings or inside pockets or purses while someone is driving.
That statement is so crazy that it makes me wonder what the the CEO of Nokia is doing. Doesn't he realize he should stop nonsense like that?
Another great example as to how Tesla has shaped our future. Truly ahead of his time by leaps and bounds.
I know Tesla is a posterboy for the Slashdot community, but I think you mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Hertz. Hertz was responsible for the discovery that you could generate and detect radio waves.
That lead to the use of radio for communications, which is why such a modern device as the article describes. Tesla envisioned pumping energy into the air via dedicated stations. I don't think he envisioned a situation where we would be pumping so much energy into the air for communications, that there would be usable power as a byproduct.
I find it frightening, not "cool", that such a device is possible, given that my body relies on faint electrical signals.
Please help metamoderate.
This sounds really bad if they don't limit the frequencies. Who is going to be responsible when this causes problems with the low powered (3W radios/~100W repeaters) 800Mhz trunked radio systems that Police and Fire departments use?
... figure out a way to force people to pay them money for this ambient background radio power? And how are they going to keep freeloaders from stealing it?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
50 milliwatts of ambient power? I don't feel so good....
It's pending that the cures be found safe and effective by the FDA and profitable by the drug companies.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
"... if 1 Megawatt gives you 6 milliwatts..." That's off by a factor of 1,000. One megawatt gave 6 microwatts.
The Nokia press release says they are expecting almost 10,000 times 6 microwatts, all received inside a tiny cell phone that is covered with metal.
Puts me in mind of the numerous (see Pop Sci and Radio & Electronics from the 50s) attempts to power submarines with the "free" power of the earth's magnetic field.
"We are transparent to radio waves..."
The human body is mostly water mixed with salt, which is conductive and therefore opaque to radio waves.
I agree with you. The total amount of energy is tiny, especially when tiny antennas are used.
That's pretty heavy. Don't you think? Besides, isn't there a "density" issue here?
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
For a short time, I lived within a couple of kilometres of an AM transmission tower. A pair of vintage high-impedence headphones, a high-power rectifier diode and an earth were all I needed to listen. I was toying with the idea of home-made detectors (galena, iron pyrites, rusty razor blades and a piece of lead etc), but moved before I got around to it.
Nikolai is laughing in his grave as we speak.
Curing cancer will never be as profitable as treating it.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
I could see this becoming a hit with the ghost hunting crowd as an alternative to EMF detectors. "Hey, my phone just got power! There's a ghost nearby!"
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Why not atomic?
What made me think of this was the digital watch I had back in the late seventies that used radioactive tritium for a backlight. It was bright enough on a dark night to use as a flashlight. The only downside was that there was no way to shut it off, a disadvantage when going out to a movie. (Oh, and my left arm fell off. Not really.)
The significant advance since the times of Tesla is that devices take much less power to operate, which is, I think, the real reason broadcast power has become interesting again.
During recent years, there's been significant advances in atomic batteries. So, given that, why not atomic? If a device is typically replaced every three years (or one year if from Apple), I wonder if a tritium betavoltaic (for instance) of sufficient capacity could be made small enough to reside in the device, either powering it directly or charging a conventional battery during periods of unuse.
I'm thinking, watches, almost certainly. Solid state personal music players, possibly. Phones... maybe?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
When the gp said "We are transparent to radio waves..." I think he meant frequencies traditionally associated with radio waves, i.e. wavelengths longer than microwaves. Yes, I know microwaves can be used as radio, but that's not my point and probably not his either.
Sounds like it would create a black hole nearby regarding all information transmissions. That could be interesting...
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
cue rim-shot
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Would that be cheaper to do than sticking a solar cell on the phone?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
When you need to recharge your phone, just put it in the microwave oven for 30 seconds and whammo you have 4 bars of battery!
Saves you from having to carry your charger with you.
Why not? A little bit of understanding of how these devices work will tell you why there are better alternatives. What they really are is some radioactive material mostly emitting photons and a photovoltaic material emitting electrons. Why not just leave the heavy stuff out of it and use the photovoltiacs since you are not going to get much out of a very small source? Where these things actually work is if you have an intense radioactive source (and a pile of sheilding) but if you have a small source weaker than sunlight why bother? If it's sometimes dark use a battery and charge it.
If it's always dark and it isn't attached to a human being and weight doesn't matter a lot (or if decent sheilding doesn't matter at all you can get the weight down - eg. satellites) then you have a point.
You think the Earth's environment is something of tantamount importance? WE NEED TO STOP THE INSANITY!
Can't you see?
This type of technology is starting a race to the impending heat death of the universe!
Won't somebody think of the childrens childrens childrens childrens childrens childrens childrens childrens children?
6 microwatts from a 1.0-megawatt TV antenna 4.1 kilometers away.
4 km from the megawatt tower does not put you in the boondocks.
In the real world, how much power can you realistically expect to extract from this thing?
I'd think that even a small solar cell on the device would give more power on average than that.
So? What does it matter whether it's "an actual stream of electrons moving along like wires"? Electrical signals in biological systems get generated and transmitted by tiny local movements of ions across membranes in order to change local electrical fields, fields that then change the shape of charged molecules slightly. The process is very sensitive to electrical fields, and it can be affected by radio waves.
Why not have the power harvester tuned to 50hz (60hz for you Americans)? It's practically all around you, everywhere, especially in office buildings where there's cables running through walls and roofs.
Why not just have the phones suck the heat from the user's bodies? They're already sucking our lives away every time they ring.
You'd know what I'm talking about if you've seen The Quiet Earth
Unless there happens to be more than one pharmaceutical company and when one milks the patented treatment drugs, the other won't see a slice of the pie and 'decide' that curing cancer can indeed result in profit.
While the voltages involved are small (up to a hundred millivolts), it's the strength of the electrical field that is important ant this is more on the order of thousands of volts per metre, more then an order of magnitude stronger then you would find near even the strongest transmitters.
This is an easy project for a 16 year old provided mummy or daddy is a full professor of physics at Stanford.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I'm not forgetting. What transmitters are there between 500 MHz and 10 GHz? Digital TV. Low power cellular phone transmitters; that's what "cellular" means, many low-power transmitters. The tiny power of Wi-Fi. From 3 GHz and up there are only cordless phones. With a small antenna expect picowatts, not microwatts. The Slashdot story says it is possible to get 50 million times more power than a picowatt, 50 milliwatts.
From Wikipedia: "The maximum power for DTV broadcast classes is also substantially lower; one-fifth of the legal limits for the former full-power analog services."
Fraud -- A deliberate deception to try to get an unfair or unlawful gain.
This Slashdot story says it was submitted by "Al" of Technology Review. I wonder if it is a paid advertisement. It in fact it is an ad presented as a story, that is deception.
In my opinion, this Slashdot story is sensalionalistic nonsense that appears to try to take advantage of the average person's lack of knowledge of radio waves.
Reasons to be skeptical: 1) There is often very poor radio and television reception inside buildings in cities. That's partly because the buildings contain metal reinforcement. There is very little power from electromagnetic radiation.
2) In normal circumstances, a small antenna could never deliver 50 milliwatts of power. It is more likely that a single transmitter will deliver picowatts to a small antenna. A level of 50 milliwatts is a million times what would normally be expected.
3) Nothing changed. The physics of electromagnetic radiation and of reception by antennas has been understood well for decades. There was no new discovery, and none was claimed.
more then an order of magnitude stronger then you would find near even the strongest transmitters.
That's like arguing that because the supply voltage of a device is 5V, injecting 500mV variation in any of its signal lines don't matter. That's a bad argument. Even a tiny variation in field strengths matters because these are systems that are operating near their thresholds, and that's not even taking into account a whole lot of other effects that can further amplify small disturbances.
What is it with people with training in physics or electrical engineering that when they approach biological systems, all their training and ability to reason goes out the window?
What we really need is some kind of device which could harvest radiation in the 400-700 nm range and charge your mobile phone with it.
Squirrel!
This is quite correct; after doing a tiny bit of research, I found this and this (also plenty more if you're interested).
While it's nothing conclusive, it would appear that EMR can indeed mess with neurons.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Or send a bunch of photons from a source to a photovoltaic receiver.
You could use a launching laser and a light sail, but that gets you acceleration, not electricity.
it's amazing that it's taken any company a few hundred years to finally harness Nikola Tesla's dream of wireless power transmition. Amazing that the company that now own's the old Waldendorf tower would thusly want to sell it off or demolish it for a car park
I've got news for you. It's being done on a large scale currently.
It's called RFID.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
How long till the electrical power lobby buys out the patent and buries it?
Intellectual Property: an immaterial non-entity, most fiercely contended by those with no proper intellect to speak of.
Soon enough, ... calm yourself... this
and we wont even be plugging things in any more... and
@yo tuco, wake you up when its at 1.21Giga
is a start and i think its a good one at that.
http://www.iphonenewsstand.com
Back in the late 50's and early 60's Popular Electronics had plans for a dual tuner receiver which took the signal from a strong station and rectified it to drive an audio amplifier to a small speaker, so you could use the other tuner to listen to a weak station.
The idea of capturing power in a useful way is hardly new, about 1990 there was company building a home portable setup which used a tuned cavity to capture EM from a sending station. I don't remember the details, as the price was over my threshold for buying stuff I didn't need just to see how well it worked.