Sony Prototype Sends Electricity Through the Air

itwbennett writes "Sony announced Friday that it has developed a prototype power system based on magnetic resonance that can send 'a conventional 100 volt electricity supply over a distance of 50 centimeters to power a 22-inch LCD television.' Unfortunately, Sony's prototype wasted 1/5 of the power fed into it and additional losses 'occurred in circuitry connected to the secondary coil so the original 80 watts of power was cut by roughly a quarter to 60 watts once it had made its way through the system.'"

Comments

One thing we know for sure

[oldspewey]

If this is a Sony technology, you better believe the electricity is going to be in some kind of proprietary format that requires you to purchase special electrons at a 30% premium over industry standard.

Re:It's a start

[JeanBaptiste]

I don't know, if they could make it out to 1000 barleycorns or even several rods, i'd buy a hogshead of them next fortnight.

Missed it by that much!

[Citizen of Earth]

Only another 42,163.9995 km to go to use this to send solar power from geosynchronous orbit.

Sony Should Shop At ThinkGeek

[Rary]

Quick! Somebody buy the Sony engineers a pair of these!

Re:can we get this tagged

[Rei]

75% efficiency is perfectly acceptable for low power devices. Making and shipping alkaline batteries repeatedly, or relying on rechargeable NiMH batteries that often leak more energy than gets used in the device, is certainly far more wasteful. So using this sort of tech to power those kinds of devices (clocks, smoke alarms, stick-on lights, etc) sounds quite reasonable. I'd certainly buy a $20 device that meant I never had to change a smoke alarm or clock battery again. In fact, 75% efficiency means it'd probably be a about breakeven powering a NiMH Roomba or Scooba versus charging their packs (in addition to leaking, NiMH isn't a very efficient charger). So you could have your home robotics never leak charge or have to waste energy charging, and never have battery packs need to be replaced, as well as the obvious "no limit on how long they can run for before needing to go back to dock".

They're going to have to significantly improve on the range, though. 1 1/2 feet isn't much at all.

Another interesting possibility would be to have a pocket-sized device powered by a li-ion battery pack. Carry it on your person and all of your portable gismos -- cameras, flashlights, cell phones, etc -- stay charged. When you get back home or to your hotel room, you plug it in to charge it. They wouldn't need as much range improvement, but they would need to make it a lot smaller than 40cm across (unless it'd be something you carry in a backpack).

Certainly you don't want 75% efficiency running TVs or charging electric cars (unless you can do it on the road, for long trip range extending -- but then you'd need some *serious* range!). But for battery-powered devices, that's fine.

Re:Wasted 1/5 of energy?

[nhytefall]

The wasted energy is most likely dissipated as high frequency RF energy. In most primary/secondary coil designs (for the less enlightened... think Tesla coil), the bulk (80-90%) of "lost" energy is dissipated as high frequency RF. The rest is dissipated as heat and light.

Re:can we get this tagged

[smallfries]

Indeed, just because this early prototype has 75% efficiency we must assume that the maximum that can ever be achieved. Best to just stop investigating it instead of working on improving the range and efficiency. After all scientific progress has advanced quite far enough hasn't it?

God forbid that we improve this technology and use it to replace other sources of loss to reduce energy consumption! After all we are rapidly moving towards an electric infrastructure for vehicles, and they are always this close to the road. Imagine just how bad it would be for global warming if we replaced batteries (and their associated losses) with this technology. Evil scientists.

Re:It's a start

[Oronar]

Already sold as a product. http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/wec.shtml