Beyond the horizon, but worth keeping en eye on . . .
BBC NEWS | Technology | Physics promises wireless power
US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players wirelessly.
The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of many metres, the researchers said.
Although the team had not built and tested a system, computer models and mathematics suggest it would work.
“There are so many autonomous devices such as cell phones and laptops that have emerged in the last few years,” said Assistant Professor Marin Soljacic from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the researchers behind the work.
“We started thinking, ‘it would be really convenient if you didn’t have to recharge these things’.
“And because we’re physicists we asked, ‘what kind of physical phenomenon can we use to do this wireless energy transfer?’.”
The answer the team came up with was “resonance”, a phenomenon that causes an object to vibrate when energy of a certain frequency is applied.
3 Comments
Tuk Tuk Driver
In future the mobile phones were so small and they would be charged from a source that can be tapped easily. The most obvious choices are the solar power and body heat. The charging of batteries will happen automatically, without users having to bother about it.
This experiment is still not proved to be a practically viable solution, but even it becomes viable, it would not have much use because of the reasons above.
janantha
The problem with power is that it has health and safety issue,and transferring power over the air should only involve wattages that are within the public safety range. This is normally in mW(mili Watts), But who knows the chips and other miniature components may be created in a way to charge it self up using lower power ranges..!
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