Wireless Power Transmission WithWiTricity
Long life lithium ion batteries and even methanol fuel cells have long been touted as ways to make us laptop users more mobile. However a new concept emerging from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dubbed "WiTricity", could soon help us break free from the shackles of power leads and batteries.
Whenever aperson in a cartoon has an idea then, more often than not, adisembodied light bulb appears above their inspired head. Ialways wondered where does the power come to light that bulb?Well it would seem the answer comes from the boys at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology, as they have successfullypowered a 60 Watt bulb remotely from a power source over 7 feetaway.
To create "WiTricity", they have employed an old concept ofphysics called "resonance", a technique that causes a physicalentity to vibrate when a certain frequency isapplied. Now if you can get two entities to vibrate at the same frequency theyexchange energy, even with out direct line of sight.
As theenergy builds up it produces usable voltage with each cycle, andsure enough, with a transmitter one end and a receiver the otherthe light bulb pops into life.
It's exactly the same thing that happens when you see an operasinger smash a glass using just her voice, both the frequency ofthe glass and the voice has matched, the energy is stored in theglass until it can contain no more and it shatters.
At the moment the experiments have shown there is a 40%efficiency rate using this kind of technology, but that is boundto increase with further experimentation and could prove usefulfor laptop users the world over. MIT's Professor Peter Fisher hadthis to say:
".....power levels more than sufficient to run a laptop can betransferred over room-sized distances nearly omni-directionallyand efficiently, irrespective of the geometry of the surroundingspace, even when environmental objects completely obstruct theline-of-sight between the two coils......As long as the laptop isin a room equipped with a source of such wireless power, it wouldcharge automatically, without having to be plugged in. In fact,it would not even need a battery to operate inside of such aroom." In the long run, this could reduce our society'sdependence on batteries, which are currently heavy andexpensive......"
Obviously this opens up all kind of applications with thewireless world that we all live in now. Could this actually meanthat the very last wire that binds our laptops to power socketscan now be cut?
Could it be "Light's out" for laptop batteries, fuel cells andpower cables? Nice work MIT chaps, but how about a little creditfor old Nikola Tesla. As early as 1891 this Serbian born genius came up with a wireless power transmission concept, otherwise known as the "Tesla Effect", over a century before MITLab's "WiTricity".
