Charging laptops and such through the air! This isn’t science fiction, it’s physics!
This has been making the rounds on the tech news circuit today, but I saw it on the BBC first. This is so amazing that I just had to let it sink in a bit before I could blog it, okay I’ve been busy today too. Anyway, this is the way it works:
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.
"When you have two resonant objects of the same frequency they tend to couple very strongly," Professor Soljacic told the BBC News website.
[snip]
Hence, 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 illustration shows what happens. The coil on the left is plugged into the outlet. The antenna (2) resonates at a frequency of 6.4Mhz (which isn’t dangerous to us, btw), the energy can travel up to 5 m / 16.4 ft to the other antenna (also resonating at 6.4Mhz) where the energy (electricity) is transferred. What to know the coolest thing? Nicola Telsa (the father of modern electrical generation) figured this out 100 years ago but ran out of money during testing to see if it could really work.
Tags: wireless electricity
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