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Intel Demos Wireless "Resonant" Recharging
Al writes "Last Thursday researchers from Intel demonstrated a way to recharge electronics from about meter away using a 'resonant' magnetic field. At an event held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, the researchers showed off a pair of iPod speakers connected to a 30-centimeter-wide copper coil that received power from a similar, but larger, copper coil about a meter away. The recharging technique relies on a phenomenon called resonant coupling, in which objects can exchange energy when tuned to resonate at the same frequency. A similar approach was developed by researchers at MIT in 2007, and spun off into a company called WiTricity. This company has already developed a few products that use resonant coupling to recharge, including a car battery."
Pacemakers lol?
Seriously, this is nothing more than a simple application of a simple science experiment.
Wireless fields / broadcasts are a joke, and until we change the laws of physics, always will be. (Directed transmissions are not a joke.)
As everyone's credit cards were erased during the demo.
They did expect users with paper currency and PMs would be more open to purchase.
I'm having a little trouble here with the concept. Instead of small white box plugged into the wall we have these freaking huge copper wires running in circles everywhere. Just doesn't jibe with the trendy iPod image.
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Isn't resonant vibration the way tons of energy transfers occur, including plain old radio communication?
What makes this so novel?
what is the power consumption of the transmitting coil when there is no load coil, also, does the power consumption increase or decrease based on the number of receiving coils??
and, what happens if you place a HDD, or your phone contains a HDD and is charged using this method, wont the magnetic field damage the magnetic media??
similarly, magnetic fields can mess up CRT's, try taking a magnet to a CRT screen..
I get a real charge out of it.
i always wondered what that coil was for
NicolaTesla
he was recharging his ipod!!!
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
....it's called 'using batteries'. With a 3 meter range and relatively huge copper coils involved, how is this better that using batteries? Most devices use a transformer to customize the input for the device. With wireless power, would each device need some kind of special wireless receiver/transformer? And this would be better how?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Did they ensure that the iPod speakers were properly shielded against RDF interference? Now that Jobs is getting his strength back, I fully expect that Apple devices will discard with batteries completely and just feed off his sheer willpower.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Anybody familiar with the efficiency of this process? What fraction of the wattage is lost during transfer?
Aeroespacio.org
Nikola Tesla and that crazy discovery of wireless energy transfer. Next time you power up your gizmo (via AC to DC conversion) raise a glass to the man who started it all!
So in this era of concern about energy supplies, we have a new way to charge our phones that is less efficient and will waste a ton of energy. But at least we won't trip over any cables.
Isn't resonant coupling what Wacom tablets use to both power and communicate with their styluses and pucks (kinda-sorta tablet mice)? I know it's not technically "charging" either of them, per se, but it IS powering them, and it's done by resonance coupling.
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
7MHz? Good luck getting that through the FCC regulations on radiated emissions, not to mention all of those HAM operators. However, if they do achieve 80% efficiency then I will wish them the best of luck.
I read about this sort of thing awhile ago. http://www.pwrmat.com/ There would be some nifty applications, you could build this sort of power distribution system into a wall. Then you just have to be within the proximity of the distributor. It would primarily be a convince/lazy thing, but at least you wouldn't have to worry about your kid putting a fork in a wall socket. Then again by doing that you could be removing a natural selection factor and end up with even more stupid people that otherwise would have been electrocuted and taken out of the gene pool.
There are at least four schemes for short-range wireless power transmission around. This needs to be standardized so it can be deployed.
The very short range ones, which couple a tabletop pad to a device on it, would be most useful. All the little stuff that needs recharging should be on the same system, with recharging pads in bedroom, office, hotel room, car, airline tray table, Starbucks, etc. Unless the players get together and agree on a standard, this is going nowhere.
Why are there so many replies in this topic modded as "Troll"? Even ones that clearly are not trolls. Is someone trolling the mod system?
I guess we're going to have to stop using those 'wireless power' jokes that pop up whenever we come across equipment that's been unplugged!
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
http://www.powercastco.com/
They even won a best of CES 2007 award from CNET:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-12760_7-9673092-5.html
They released working wirelessly powered Christmas tree lights in December 2007 as a consumer product!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9793204-1.html
Stuff like this comes up all the time but disappears down the memory hole very shortly thereafter.
They already afraid of Cellphones
Tesla would be so proud, many years later we are finally honing and putting to use technology that was before it's time.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
I see a lot of you saying things like, "big deal," "this idea sucks," "just use batteries," etc. As though the current implementation is the final version of this technology. I'm surprised that, on /. of all places, you guys aren't thrilled that this implies in the near future you won't even notice this technology... it ought to just work.
Instead you're all bashing it and claiming it's a bad/stupid idea and implying they ought to just scrap the whole project.
I say - keep working on it, no matter how ugly those coils are, because I know sooner or later, I won't even see the coils anymore.
australian project gutenberg is better than the original.
The New Palm Pre does this now, just not across a large distance. The Pre has the alternate charger that you just place your Pre on (no wires to hook up or plug in to the Pre itself) and it charges through the back of the phone. Pretty cool, actually.
As a long time listener of Garage Logic on AM1500 (I only had AM in my car growing up, go fig) they frequently refer to a guy named Samer (sp?). He had a theory that the reason people, as a whole, have lost it, is that all the electromagnetic noise and radiation we have created litterally is frying out brain's ability to function normally.
With all this talk about wireless charging and what I see in the world, I am starting to wonder if this Samer theory has legs... and if so what are the implications on humans?
We know power lines can confuse cows internal compass. We've seen radar stations toss migratory birds a curve ball. What are the larger implications on humans since we've never really looked into how much all that 'noise' effects us.
Simply ask yourself this: You are in a room with 5 people in silence. Any stress? Ok now as the noise increases, does the stress? Now ask this: what about all the noise you don't perceive but still might pick up... is this going to be just more noise and if so what are the implications if we assume the Samer theory has some validity.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
When I was a kid, I had an electric toothbrush that charged via induction. Not the same thing this article is about but it seemed like magic at the time. Set the plastic toothbrush in its plastic base with no metallic contacts on either and it would charge. I was just a kid but even I knew you needed conductive material to conduct electricity and plastic wasn't conductive. (I thought my grandpa was pulling my leg and taking the battery out and charging it at night while I was asleep.)
I hope nobody throws a bunch of these off a cliff.
It could cause a resonance cascade.
Make it cheap enough and combine this with cheap electronic paper and we could have store aisles stocked with animated labels on anything big enough to carry a receiving antenna.
If you think walking with your child down the gauntlet that is the cereal aisle is bad now...
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
I can imagine a dish or plate on top of your dresser where you can throw your ipod, phone etc at night and it charges without having to plug it in.
Hmmm. Resonant coupling, magnetic fields, wireless power transmission, where have I heard this before?
...when your tinfoil hat can save you from brain cancer... ^C
So here is what I imagine. You know how a generator works, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_generator Spinning copper wire around a shaft generating a current. And something has to spin the shaft.
With this, the idea is that the generator is something resonating. e.g. It is just moving back and forth. So you make these very small, and put them inline with a battery. If you come within a resonate field, your batteries are automatically charged.
There is a lot of waste. It's never going to be as energy efficient to plug one of field generators into a wall to charge up, versus an electrical cord. However, what if you use other power sources? Solar for example. Plug in a resonate field generator into a solar source, and have it generate this field all day long. You come home, leave your cell phone and Laptop unused on your desk, and by morning it is charged. That's the idea, at least. Baby first steps.
A company I worked for was charging the batteries in medical implants in this manner 10 years ago. In fact, the implant's charge coil is inside its Titanium case. The magnetic field goes right through the case. The charger had a class E amplifier. It worked very well. I would not doubt if this company already has a patent on this technique.
"I never dreamed I'd see a resonance cascade failure, let alone create one"...
This all sounds very similar to that new fangled gadget called a radio. I read about them here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio
Gee, we had something similar in 1965 in the form of an electric toothbrush... the primary side of the "transformer" was the A.C. line, the secondary was inside the body of the toothbrush motor body and it recharged every time you put it on the stand. They increased the efficiency by having a "pole piece" sticking up inside the body of the toothbrush motor when it was in the charging stand, but other than that it was nothing new.
EMI all over the place just because people don't want to plug something in? No thanks. Efficient it ain't. Safe? Not for all the credit cards and other magnetic media in your wallet.
A few years ago, I had an powered toothbrush set that charged that way - bought it in a branch of the LIDL supermarket.
How does this compare?
thinkgeek already has a wireless extension cord (110v A/C) if Im gonna fry something, use microwave!
link: http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/wec.shtml
image: http://images.thinkgeek.com/products/zoom/wec.jpg
pay no attention to the fact this was an april fools joke originally... Since I believe science fiction is based on reality (though not always implemented as such) this must be real too!
They've recreated the technology in my rechargable toothbrush! This is a true breakthrough. I can't wait to see what's next! Maybe a wireless communications device? Or a horseless carriage? Oh, the wonders of the modern scientist!
That is all.
What happens if it happens to "resonantly connect" with the springs in your sofa or other metal loops in your house where passing a large current and the associated heating may lead to a fire? The chance of something being exactly the correct dimensions may be small but how small exactly given the number of different locations this might be deployed in? You'll probably need some safety system to ensure that this does not happen.
....but that is a constant (in time) magnetic field. Living creatures can sustain far higher fields than that (lookup the video of the flying frog on You Tube - this uses fields ~10 times higher than NMR to suspend creatures and objects through diamagnetism). I doubt there is a problem for a varying magnetic field but the situation is not exactly the same.
Another non-story from Slashdot that advertises a magazine. Was someone paid for this Slashvertisement?
This is old, old technology, with no new elements.
Sometimes referred to as lightening.
The people behind these resonant antenna ideas usually seem to ignore the effects of large electromagnetic fields on biological tissue. It is a risk to have a rf magnetic field of say 30 microteslas at f > 20 MHz in a region with human access. There are very strict rules of the exposure limits based on the ICNIRP guidelines
http://www.icnirp.de/documents/emfgdl.pdf
The people developing magnetic resonance imaging devices (MRI) have struggled with the issues of induced rf currents and rf heating (SAR) for a long time. They are using similar frequencies but lower average rf magnetic fields because of the safety limitations. Kinda funny seeing this kind of hype where the safety point of view is completely forgotten. Maybe someone just rewrote the Maxwell equations...
Think what happens when a microwave oven leaks rf. Remember the discussions of "dangerously high" rf radiation levels from cell phones. It is the same mine field here.
80% efficiency looks good on paper. However, will energy stay cheap such that one can accept a reduced efficiency? This would work wonders on large scale. Electric cars that don't need a huge battery packs. Just some ultra caps..
They put you on bypass machine, which pumps blood for you. It's not the same at all, but it's not all that much different. It's amazing how mechanical surgery is.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Looks like the secret Intel Police secured the Missing Tesla Documents and have been working on it in secret at these years. They cant touch me now that the secret is out *&%#$( NO CARRIER