I wasn't sure.
Sounds very plausible.
Graham
From the MIT News story: "they were able to identify the strongly
coupled regime in this system, even when the distance between them was
several times larger than the sizes of the resonant objects."
That isn't unreasonable, however the idea that you can couple
energy efficiently with 10 or more times the distance (as compared to
the size of radiator) without some directional coupling is a bit far
fetched. I'm sure that you could arrange two devices so that one could
track the other, and beam the energy towards the target. That would
work at a useful distance. If someone got in the way of the beam,
there would be some pretty serious health concerns, especially with
the 60 watt power level they used.
From their blurb: "they were able to light a 60W light bulb from a
power source seven feet (more than two meters) away; there was no
physical connection between the source and the appliance". That's not
really amazing, taking the information from the first quote, since it
implies the resonant objects were about a meter in size.
A practical implementation based on the above suggests a coil in
your computer "hutch" or desk that could power a laptop sitting on the
same desk. Thinking back to all the concerns with EM fields from
monitors we had 10-20 years ago (I was a consultant for EM radiation
cases, and built measuring devices then), I sure wouldn't want one on
MY desk.
My impression is that everyone is looking for a scheme where the
transmitter is more or less omnidirectional, and the the receiver can
efficiently "suck up" most of the radiated power, and reduce the
electromagnetic fields elsewhere. If such things existed, we'd want
the range to be 10-100 or more times the size of the rcv/trx devices.
Do you know of such a scheme? I think the whole thing is fantasy!
Magnetic or electric fields do interact (differently) with the
body. You cannot discount the effect of magnetic fields, especially if
they are time variant - even at 60 Hz.
Paul G.
