What if you can remotely charge your smartphone with the flat-screen TV in your living room? If we believe a team of US engineers, turning your living room into a wireless charging station is not a far-fetched dream.<\/p>\n
The flat-screen technology can produce a wide-range, wireless power transfer devices, say engineers from Duke University and University of Washington, adding that the technology already exists to build such a system and it is only a matter of time to design it.<\/p>\n
“Whether its headphones, cell phones, watches or even your mouse and keyboard, a major irritation for consumers is the hassle of being tethered to cords to recharge batteries,” said David Smith, professor at Duke.<\/p>\n
“They always run dry at the worst possible moment. Our proposed system would be able to automatically and continuously charge any device anywhere within a room, making dead batteries a thing of the past,” Smith wrote in a paper posted on the arXiv pre-print e-repository.<\/p>\n
Some wireless charging systems already exist to help power speakers, cell phones and tablets. The problem to date has been that the antennas in a wireless power transfer system would need to be able to focus on any device within a room.<\/p>\n
The solution proposed by Smith and his colleagues relies on metamaterials — a synthetic material composed of many individual, engineered cells that together produce properties not found in nature.<\/p>\n
“Imagine you have an electromagnetic wave front moving through a flat surface made of thousands of tiny electrical cells,” said Smith.<\/p>\n
“If you can tune each cell to manipulate the wave in a specific way, you can dictate exactly what the field looks like when it comes out on the other side,” he explained.<\/p>\n
According to the results, a flat metamaterial device no bigger than a typical flat-screen television could focus beams of microwave energy down to a spot about the size of a cell phone within a distance of up to 10 metres.<\/p>\n
It should also be capable of powering more than one device at the same time.<\/p>\n
“The ability to safely direct focused beams of microwave energy to charge specific devices, while avoiding unwanted exposure to people, pets and other objects, is a game-changer for wireless power,” said co-author Matt Reynolds from the University of Washington.<\/p>\n
Smith has used this principle to create the world’s first cloaking device that bends electromagnetic waves around an object held within.<\/p>\n
To achieve this on a big scale, a powerful, low-cost electromagnetic energy source would need to be developed.<\/p>\n
“I think building a system like this, which could be embedded in the ceiling and wirelessly charge everything in a room, is a very feasible scheme,” Smith noted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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