Wireless Power Demonstrated

Necroloth and other readers sent in the story of Witricity's latest demo at the TED Global conference in Oxford, UK. The company is developing a system that can deliver power to devices without the need for wires. The idea is not new — electrical pioneers Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla assumed that power would be delivered wirelessly. The BBC quotes the inventor behind Witricity's tech as saying that Tesla and Edison "...couldn't imagine dragging this vast infrastructure of metallic wires across every continent." eWeek Europe notes some hurdles the technology must overcome: "The 2007 experiment it is based on had an efficiency of only around 45 percent, but [Witricity's CEO] promised power delivered wirelessly would start out 15 percent more expensive than wires, and improve on that." Intel has also demonstrated wireless charging.

Comments

Standard interface?

[elwinc]

Resonant transfer is great stuff, but what we need even more is a standard interface so that all our rechargable devices can recharge at the same source.

Re:Standard interface?

[dgatwood]

I think that's massive overkill. Just provide a 12V rail, a 5V rail, and a ground using a polarized plug. Heck, you can probably dispense with the 12V rail. A 5V rail by itself should cover the vast majority of portable electronics these days. Amperage negotiation? Build the supply so that if it is under too much load, it sheds power connections, then periodically switches which jacks are shed. That's much cheaper to design, and it doesn't unnecessarily add to the complexity of the devices that use it.

Thomas Edison ???

[nurb432]

Electrical pioneer my ass, he just got lucky once and was able to afford to hire good talent ( like Nikola ). But i totally agree that Tesla proved it was possible ( and WAS a pioneer ). But he also proved that it takes more then tech to make such a project work, it also needs funding. As brilliant as he was, a businessman he wasn't, and we were set decades behind on projects such as this.

Retarded.

[girlintraining]

Blasting large amounts of EMI solely to avoid the need to put a battery in something is stupid. Right now EM radiation is controlled to the lowest levels it can practically be in order to achieve some transfer of information between two or more points. Any power transfer system is going to muck up what's already in the air. It's called Shannon's Law -- and no matter how you sex up the technology, the fact is you're raising the noise floor doing this.

Bad engineer. No cookie for you.