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Wireless Power To Recharge Laptops?
Wireless power to recharge laptops and mobile phones could soon become a reality according to a U.S. team of physicists. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have shown how power can be transmitted without wires.
The scientists demonstrated the idea using copper antennas, a light bulb, and an electricity supply. They believe that "scaled-down versions of the system could be made for portable devices without sacrificing efficiency. This might also enable the design of electronic medical implants that do not need cumbersome wiring," according to the Institute of Physics.
The concept of wireless power has been entertained since the early 1900s. At that time the Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla envisioned a world of wireless power using a network of high-voltage coils and large electric fields. Tesla's idea was held back by safety concerns.
More recent proposals have transmitters emitting in all directions, which has been inefficient, and unidirectional transmitters have been impractical for most applications because they need a clear line of sight between transmitter and receiver, the institute said. Using certain electromagnetic waves that generally tend to decay quickly as they extend from an antenna could be the solution to past problems, MIT researchers noted.
To get a little bit geeky, the scientists "thought that if the receiver could resonate with the transmitter, the evanescent field would instigate a current between the two. In this way, non-resonant objects placed in the field would neither interrupt the signal nor absorb much of the field's energy." -- Winter Casey
Posted by Andrew on June 21, 2007 03:42 PM | Permalink
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