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Electricity without wires
2.09, Fri Jun 8 2007
The three-pin electrical plug could be history as scientists have demonstrated a simple way to transmit electricity through the air.
The wireless electricity could mean a future of wireless gadgets.
Researchers lit a 60-watt light bulb from an energy source seven feet away and they hope the system can be adapted to charge mobile phones, MP3 players, laptops and other appliances.
The American inventor Nikola Tesla first drew up plans for wireless electricity transfer a century ago, using huge coils to generate electromagnetic fields but only managed a low level of power transfer.
The new approach involves two coils joined by an invisible resonating magnetic field.
One coil attached to a power source acts as a sender unit and the field resonates with a receiver coil, inducing a current to flow through it.
The energy-transfer system was more than powerful enough to run a laptop over room-sized distances.
Professor Peter Fisher, who helped to conduct the research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US, said: "As long as the laptop is in a room equipped with a source of such wireless power, it would charge automatically, without having to be plugged in. In fact, it would not even need a battery to operate inside of such a room."
Source
2.09, Fri Jun 8 2007
The three-pin electrical plug could be history as scientists have demonstrated a simple way to transmit electricity through the air.
The wireless electricity could mean a future of wireless gadgets.
Researchers lit a 60-watt light bulb from an energy source seven feet away and they hope the system can be adapted to charge mobile phones, MP3 players, laptops and other appliances.
The American inventor Nikola Tesla first drew up plans for wireless electricity transfer a century ago, using huge coils to generate electromagnetic fields but only managed a low level of power transfer.
The new approach involves two coils joined by an invisible resonating magnetic field.
One coil attached to a power source acts as a sender unit and the field resonates with a receiver coil, inducing a current to flow through it.
The energy-transfer system was more than powerful enough to run a laptop over room-sized distances.
Professor Peter Fisher, who helped to conduct the research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US, said: "As long as the laptop is in a room equipped with a source of such wireless power, it would charge automatically, without having to be plugged in. In fact, it would not even need a battery to operate inside of such a room."
Source
