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."

Comments

power consumption

[mehrotra.akash]

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..

Already have wireless power....

[Itninja]

....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?

Wasted Energy

[wjousts]

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.