Disney Develops Room With 'Ubiquitous Wireless' Charging (cnet.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: The scientific and tech arm of the entertainment giant Disney has built a prototype room with "ubiquitous wireless power delivery" that allows several devices to be charged wirelessly in much the way we get internet access through Wi-Fi. By tapping quasistatic cavity resonance, researchers discovered they could generate magnetic fields inside specially built structures to deliver kilowatts of power to mobile devices inside that structure. "This new innovative method will make it possible for electrical power to become as ubiquitous as WiFi," Alanson Sample, associate lab director and principal research scientist at Disney Research, told Phys.org. "This in turn could enable new applications for robots and other small mobile devices by eliminating the need to replace batteries and wires for charging." All you have to do is be in the room and your device will start charging automatically. And depending on where you are in the room, delivery efficiency can be as high as 95 percent, researchers said. There is one potential issue: you have to not mind being in a room constructed mostly of aluminum, that includes the walls, ceiling and floor. There's a copper pole in the middle of the room, and 15 discrete high quality factor capacitors that separate the magnetic field from the electric field.

Comments

Yea, that's interesting... Not going to work

[bobbied]

Don't take any device that couples magnetic energy in there. No credit cards, no spinning hard disks, a lot of electronic devices will be toasted upon entry and should you happen to have any leftover metal parts from some past surgery (staples, clips, knees or hips) you don't likely want to try and enter either... Figure on having similar entry restrictions as MRI machines, including the faraday shielded room for this thing.. I wonder what a set of wire rimmed glasses will do in there, in fact anything that approximates a loop of wire could have serious issues if it's conductive.

Basically they put you INSIDE a huge electromagnet with fairly high flux values. They resonate the whole thing to a specific frequency by inserting some capacitance, then size their collector (which is still larger than most cell phones) can collect power from the magnetic fields. Room size will be limited, basically because of the power density required to get useful power transfer is still really high and it will approach unsafe levels as the room gets larger.

Not to mention... I dare you to grab the center pole.... It's going to have more than hundred amps flowing though it at RF (1.3 Mhz) frequencies that, despite what they say in their "safety" calculations, sure seems to be at power levels that can cause serious RF burns...

Inside the battery

[holophrastic]

So, aluminum walls, alluminum floors, copper pole in the middle -- I do believe that's actually a battery, using the air as the electrolyte. I think I might be staying out of that room.

Re:Yay, more elecromagnetic fields

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Close proximity to electrostatic or electromagnetic fields on a long-term basis is NOT good for you, period.

Really?

Yup, really.

There are three possibilities:

1) exposure to strong electrostatic or electromagnetic fields is no effect whatsoever on humans.

2) exposure to strong electrostatic or electromagnetic fields has a negative or deleterious effect on humans.

3) exposure to strong electrostatic or electromagnetic fields has a positive or beneficial effect on humans.

Which one is most likely? Remember, you're exposing a living creature to some strong (albeit non-ionizing) radiation.

What's the chance that it does have some effect? Electromagnetic radiation applied to mice it seems to produce harmful effects. It's likely that humans, especially infants and toddlers, would also be affected.