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

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.

As a physicist...

[The Master Control P]

I'd like to be the first to complain that resonant power transfer has nothing to do with quantum entanglement.

You'll be getting a memo from the Tesla Death Ray department shortly; Not observing it won't save you.

Re:Thomas Edison ???

[Heed00]

Bah. He came up with that cool electric hammer that was recently discovered as well as the extra hinged legs on chairs to stop you falling over if you lean back too far.

not all wireless power is the same

[stevenj]

There are several very different schemes currently being explored for wireless power transfer, with different strengths and weaknesses.

• Radiative transfer: send a directed beam of energy from a source to a receiver. The advantage is that this can work over long distances, the disadvantage is that you need to either have fixed locations or some active tracking system to keep pointing at the receiver as it moves around, and you need some kind of automated kill switch to make sure you don't accidentally fry anything that walks between the transmitter and receiver or waste power when the receiver is not there. It looks like PowerCast and PowerBeam fall into this category.
• Traditional inductive, non-radiative power transfer. This works well, and does not transfer power when the receiver is absent, but is extremely short-range if you want any kind of efficiency; typically, the device to be charged must be sitting directly on or adjacent to the charger. The Wireless Power Consortium is pursuing this kind of approach.
• Resonant, non-radiative power transfer. This relies on the source and receiver being electrical resonators at the same frequency, so that they preferentially transfer energy to one another rather than to other objects in the environment via resonant coupling. This is the approach being pursued by WiTricity, where they additionally rely on resonators that couple primarily via magnetic fields (the electric-field energy is mostly in capacitors inside the devices), which have the advantage that most materials are non-magnetic at these frequencies so the power source dissipates very little energy into extraneous objects (or people). (In contrast, Tesla coils produce strong electric fields external to the device, which interact much more strongly with matter; it's no coincidence that Tesla coils are used as lightning generators.) This operates efficiently at mid-range distances although not as far as radiative transfer (meters at most), does not transfer or dissipate power when the receiver is absent, and is not directional so does not require active "pointing" of the power at the receiver. But it is more complicated than the short-range non-resonant inductive transfer, and requires careful impedance-matching of the source and receiver.

Full disclosure: I know Prof. Soljacic at MIT, who founded WiTricity, although I personally have no financial interest in the company; all of the above information is public and published, however.