Nokia developing phone that recharges itself without mains electricity

[Blue Velvet]

A cell phone that never needs recharging might sound too good to be true, but Nokia says it's developing technology that could draw enough power from ambient radio waves to keep a cell-phone handset topped up.

Ambient electromagnetic radiation--emitted from Wi-Fi transmitters, cell-phone antennas, TV masts, and other sources--could be converted into enough electrical current to keep a battery topped up, says Markku Rouvala, a researcher from the Nokia Research Centre, in Cambridge, U.K.

Rouvala says that his group is working towards a prototype that could harvest up to 50 milliwatts of power--enough to slowly recharge a phone that is switched off. He says current prototypes can harvest 3 to 5 milliwatts.

Pretty nifty. 3-5 years away perhaps.

Steve Beeby, an engineer and physicist at the University of Southampton, U.K., who has researched harvesting vibrational energy, adds, "If they can get 50 milliwatts out of ambient RF, that would put me out of business." He says that the potential could be huge because MP3 players typically use only about 100 milliwatts of power and spend most of their time in lower-power mode.

Nokia is being cagey with the details of the project, but Rouvala is confident about its future: "I would say it is possible to put this into a product within three to four years." Ultimately, though, he says that Nokia plans to use the technology in conjunction with other energy-harvesting approaches, such as solar cells embedded into the outer casing of the handset.

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/22764/

Such wireless transfer of energy was first demonstrated by Nikola Tesla in 1893, who was so taken with the idea he attempted to build an intercontinental transmission tower to send power wirelessly across the Atlantic. Nokia's device is somewhat less ambitious and is made possible thanks to a wide-band antenna and two very simple circuits. The antenna and the receiver circuit are designed to pick up a wide range of frequencies — from 500 megahertz to 10 gigahertz — and convert the electromagnetic waves into an electrical current, while the second circuit is designed to feed this current to the battery to recharge it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/10/nokia-mobile-phone

 

[dehory]

Wow, crazy!

 

[zap2]

nice...lease it out and I'll be a very very happy camper!

 

[weckart]

It sounds like an inefficient way of feeding power to a device. I wonder what the overhead is? Anything that gets rid of the mess of power cables is fine by me, though.

Cue complaints from people who claim to get headaches from overhead power lines, radio masts etc.

 

[sammich]

I remember I wrote an essay on Nikola Tesla back in primary school. Too bad the guy ran out of money.

It sounds like an inefficient way of feeding power to a device. I wonder what the overhead is? Anything that gets rid of the mess of power cables is fine by me, though.

Cue complaints from people who claim to get headaches from overhead power lines, radio masts etc.

This is a secondary, free source of power. If it gets me anything like 20% extra power it's definitely welcome.

I know this might sound rather stupid, but would this like block data transmission in a LoS of a device?

 

[twoodcc]

crazy! cancer causing though?