Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Another Holy Grail for electrical engineers!

Wireless electricity ! Researchers from MIT have announced that they have a simple system that could deliver power to laptops, map3 players, etc. without cables!

Some excerpts...

The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of many metres, the researchers said.
Although the team has not built and tested a system, computer models and mathematics suggest it will work.
...
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.

Interestingly, this uses existing and old technology...

a simple copper antenna designed to have long-lived resonance could transfer energy to a laptop with its own antenna resonating at the same frequency. The computer would be truly wireless.
Any energy not diverted into a gadget or appliance is simply reabsorbed.
The systems that the team have described would be able to transfer energy over three to five metres.

And of course, Nikola Tesla had similar ideas, but had to stop his project as he ran out of funding.

Hopefully we will now be able to avoid carrying the klunky power cords/bricks for our laptops and other devices ! Here is a graphic from the BBC article on how it works...

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