How Will Wireless Power Change Our Daily Lives?
Stemming from the aspirations of the famous nineteenth-century physicist and engineer, Nikola Tesla, the notion behind wireless power has been around for decades. The idea has been vaguely implemented into commercial and military use but has yet to reach the mass-consumer market. There’s no doubt that the world is going wireless with the recent popular expansion of cellphones and Wi-Fi internet but the last remaining obstacle to remove all wiring is power. The day we eliminate these wires is soon at hand and could provide an inordinate amount of benefits to both businesses and consumers. Currently, the most common method of transmitting electricity through the air, now dubbed “WiTricity”, uses a main copper coil amplified by electricity, creating a magnetic field. [http://www.witricity.com/pages/application.html]. This method was comparable to the method used at Nikola Tesla’s 18 story-tall Wardenclyffe Tower in New York in 1901 [“Tesla Cosmic Ray Motor May Transmit Power 'Round’ Earth,” Brooklyn Eagle, July 10, 1932]. This current can be induced into one of several secondary receiving coils. There was one concern, however, that rendered the theory useless – Omni-directional fields. Their problem meant there would be an insufficient amount of power being outputted by the primary coil directed at one central location. In November 2006, researchers at MIT, led by Prof. Marin Soljačić, discovered an effective way to transfer the electricity over a larger distance using a derivation of an old technology called resonance or resonant inductive coupling [Wilson, Tracy V, "How Wireless Power Works", January 12, 2007]. Usually found in electrical engineering, resonance is the tendency of a system to oscillate greater amplitude at some frequencies than at others. Their solution meant creating the coil rings and their respective magnetic field to have oscillating amperage, ultimately generating a higher energy output. In...
Please join StudyMode to read the full document