Imagine a world without wires !! it would be a perfect world. Wires gets tangled , strangled and limit the reach for various appliances. Information week has reported that a team from MIT announced the light bulb breakthrough this week and called the concept “WiTricity,” for wireless electricity.
MIT scientists have been able to wirelessly light a 60-watt light bulb from a source seven feet away, and the experimenters believe it demonstrates — at least theoretically — that consumer electronics devices like laptops and cell phones one day could be charged without wires.
How they did that ??
Soljacic and his colleagues devised WiTricitybased off the notion of resonance . One well-known example of resonance can be seen when an opera singer hits the right note to cause a champagne glass to resonate and shatter. Two objects resonating at the same frequency tend to exchange energy efficiently, while interacting weakly with objects not resonating at the same frequency.
Instead of sound, the MIT physicists focused on magnetic fields. Most common materials interact only very weakly with magnetic fields, so little power would get wasted on unintended targets. “The fact that magnetic fields interact so weakly with biological organisms is also important for safety considerations,” said Soljacic’s colleague, MIT physicist Andre Kurs.
In their latest work, the scientists designed two copper coils roughly 20 inches in diameter that were specially designed to resonate together. One was attached to the power source, the other to a light bulb. The practical demonstration of their earlier theoretical work managed to power the light bulb even when obstacles blocked direct line of sight between the source and device.
Concept is not new
The concept of sending power wirelessly isn’t new, but its wide-scale use has been dismissed as inefficient because electromagnetic energy generated by the charging device would radiate in all directions and hence resulting in lots of wastage of energy.
The MIT system is about 40 percent to 45 percent efficient—meaning that most of the energy from the charging device doesn’t make it to the light bulb.
What’s the advantage stated here ?
“The crucial advantage of using the non-radiative field lies in the fact that most of the power not picked up by the receiving coil remains bound to the vicinity of the sending unit, instead of being radiated into the environment and lost,” said undergraduate team member Robert Moffat, according to MIT publication Tech Talk.
The MIT team also stressed that the ”magnetic coupling” process involved in WiTricity is safe on humans and other living things. And in the initial experiments on the light bulb, nothing bad happened to the cell phones, electronic equipment and credit cards in the room—though more research on that is needed
Conclusion
In spite of the excitement generated by the successful demonstration, any commercial application of wireless transmission to consumer devices isn’t likely for years, MIT team members said.
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