Soon, you can power your personal space wirelessly
The caveat: Your room has to be purpose-built for ubiquitous
wireless power transfer
Free -roaming wireless power has been the dream of engineers
since the days of Tesla and Edison waging their war of innovation but a number
of technical hurdles have prevented it from becoming a reality. The folks at
Disney Research have revealed that they have successfully built a method to
provide full coverage of an average room and power all the devices one might
need.
In a paper published in the journal Plos One, the researchers
describe their methodology for delivering around 1900 watts of energy around a
room with an efficiency of 40 to 95 per cent depending on the position.
Describing how this works starts with the worst drawback of the
system. The room needs to be specially built to provide the wireless power.
That means the walls are made of alumini um panels and there's a big, ugly
copper pipe smack in the middle going from floorto-ceiling.
In the middle of the pole, a section has been removed and 15
capacitors have been installed. This sets the resonant frequency and isolates
electric fields that are being fed into the room from a signal generator
outputting a tone at 1.32 MHz.
Once the system fires up, the room is blanketed in a magnetic
field and a receiving coil that's tuned to resonate at the same frequency
powers the devices in the room.
That 1900 watts of power we mentioned falls within federal
guidelines for specific absorption rate (SAR), which is a measure of the energy
a human body can absorb before it becomes dangerous. The thing is, the devices
in the room need to be using that energy or it could become a hazard. Also,
people shouldn't stand closer than 46 centimetres to the pole. Those problems
could be resolved with a more reactive system and some interior design.
What's important is a viable system has been tapped that could
become as ubiquitous as WiFi once the kinks are worked out.No more cord bundles
cluttering up the room and no more worrying about a dead phone .
gizmodo.in
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