Tag Archive for Electricity

| March 14, 2011
Comments Off on Wireless Charging Amped Up

Wireless Charging Amped Up

Wireless Charging Amped UpThose of us tired of dealing with tangled cord and bulky wall warts may get some relief in the near future. iSuppli Corp. is predicting that a flood of new electronic gizmos with wireless charging capabilities will be inundating the market. The market research firm believes that the global market for wireless charging devices for smartphones like the RIM (RIMM) Torch, tablet computers such as the Apple (AAPL) iPad2 media players like the Apple iPod Touch will drive the global market for wireless charging devices to 234.9 million units in 2014, up 65% from 3.6 million in 2010, according to iSuppli.

iSuppli table Tina Teng, senior analyst for wireless research at iSuppli told Itnewslink.com, “Over the next five years, wireless charging devices will find their way into an increasing number of applications, including mobile phones, portable media players, digital still cameras, and mobile PCs.”

Mobile phones will drive wireless charging acceptance according to Ms. Teng, ” …mobile phones will contribute the largest share of revenue to wireless charging-not only because of the large volume of mobile devices expected to benefit from the technology, but also because of participation by name brands in manufacturing the device, providing much-needed market recognition in the process.”

“Genius of Electricity,” 1915, Gilded Bronze, Bedminster, NJ. Photography Lee sandstead"Despite the optimism, iSuppli believes there are still barriers to the widespread adoption of wireless charging. Manufacturers will have to make wireless charging in their devices down to the circuit board level which will drive down costs. The wireless charging industry will need to adopt a common standard to ensure interoperability among products. Currently, all products are proprietary. Skins made by one company, will not work with the charger pad of another. “Until the industry finds a standard to follow, the wireless charging industry will be fragmented, and consumers will hesitate to adopt any solution that could be compromised by the rival companies,” Itnewslink.com quotes Ms. Teng, “However, an open, standardized system will create a healthier competitive environment and prompt manufacturers to join forces-which will enhance consumer awareness and lead to adoption in the markets.”

There are four wireless charging technologies. The wireless charging technologies include Near-field magnetic resistance, Far-field magnetic resistance, Conductive magnetic resistance, and Inductive magnetic resistance wireless charging systems.

  • Far-field magnetic resonance, a technology that has raised safety as well as health concerns and for which no commercial products are available for the time being.
  • Inductive wireless charging uses the principle of electromagnetic induction where current generated from the induced magnetic field in the receiver coil charges devices is the most widely wireless charging technology adopted by the value chain.  the technology enjoys wide support from semiconductor vendors, device manufacturers, accessories makers as well as retailers according to the Wireless Design and Development website. The most successful proponent of magnetic induction is Powermat, a Michigan-based company which I wrote about in 2010, that also owned 62 percent share of the wireless charging market as reported by Wireless Design and Development.

iSuppli notes that most companies are not ready with commercial products yet, several high-profile manufacturers are looking at producing wireless charging solutions. The companies include Texas Instruments (TXN) and ST-Ericsson from the semiconductor side; Nokia Corp (NOK) and Research In Motion Ltd. from the device manufacturer side; and Logitech (LOGI) and Case-Mate from the accessory manufacturer side.

Product-specific wireless charging systems consist of a charger as well as a so-called “skin” or receiver sold for specific devices. These product-specific devices contrast with aftermarket solutions, which are universal chargers and various skins that can be used with multiple consumer electronics. Growth is also projected for aftermarket wireless charging, with revenue rising at a massive five-year Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 133.4 percent.

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I hate the cluttered cluster of cables on my desk. The wireless chargers should clean up that mess, but until the manufacturers get their act together and build in some interoperability from the factory, they still got a problem.

What do you think?

Is wireless charging a practical technology?

Do you have a wireless charging rig?

Related articles

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| November 6, 2010
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Google Searches for Power on Seabed

Google Searches for Power on Seabed Google (GOOG) is investing in an undersea power cable project linking offshore wind farms with energy grids along the Mid-Atlantic region.  Known as the Atlantic Wind Connection backbone, the cable will stretch 350 miles off the Atlantic coast from New Jersey to Virginia. The cable will collect power from multiple offshore wind farms and deliver it via the cables to the on-shore grid. The AWC backbone will be able to tap into 6000 megawatts of offshore generation, enough to serve about 1.9 million homes according to reports.

Atlantic Wind Connection backboneGoogle, will take a 37.5% stake in the project. “We’re willing to take calculated risks on early-stage ideas and projects that can have dramatic impacts while offering attractive returns,” Rick Needham, green business operations director, wrote on the Google official blog.  Other investors in the project include U.S.-based Good Energies which invests in energy projects with a 37.5% equity stake, Japan’s Marubeni Corporation will have a 15% stake. Atlantic Grid Development LLC, a company formed to develop the project whose shareholders include independent transmission company Trans-Elect, will have 10%.

Project cots Google billions

Businessweek says the first phase of the project, which the developers aim to complete by early 2016, would run about 150 miles and cost between $1.7 billion and $1.8 billion. The second phase to complete the 350-mile line could be finished by 2020, Bob Mitchell, chief executive officer of Trans-Elect, told reporters telephone interview. The New York Times reports the project will cost $5 billion total in total. Reports are that Google and Good Energies’ initial investment is about $200 million each for the first phase of the project.

Google logoThe partners believe that the mid-Atlantic region’s shallow waters will make it easier to install turbines 10-15 miles offshore, almost out of sight from land. Without it, offshore wind developers would be forced to build individual radial transmission lines from each offshore wind project to the shore, Needham claimed.  “This system will act as a superhighway for clean energy,” Mr. Needham wrote, adding that the proposed project could remove “a major barrier to scaling up offshore wind“. If successful, the AWC project will help to relieve grid congestion and boost transmission capacity in a key market. Google believes that the move into alternative energy is consistent with the company’s goal of promoting renewable energy.

Spray towers over the 57-foot-tall Ludington Lighthouse in Michigan as a storm packing winds of up to 81 mph howled across the Midwest and South on Tuesday, Oct. 26. Jeff Kiessel, Ludington Daily News

This isn’t the first time Google has dipped its toe in the spreading pool of wind power. The search giant agreed to buy 114 megawatts of clean energy from an Iowa wind farm to power its data centers. Google also invested nearly 40 million in two wind farms.

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Not that I really want to bet against Google, but the IEEE reports that Michigan has an offshore potential of 100 GW, nearly double that of  Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey. Perhaps Google co-founder and East Lansing native Larry Page remembers winters in Michigan and thinks that the moving ice sheets on the lakes could damage a tower.

Michigan Offshore Wind Speeds

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| February 8, 2010
Comments Off on Wi-Fi Harvester

Wi-Fi Harvester

Wi-Fi Harvester Computerworld reports that RCA demonstrated a prototype device that converts Wi-Fi radio signals into DC power to charge wireless devices. The W-iFi Hotspot Power Harvester, also known as Airnergy, was shown at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. RCA’s device was able to charge a BlackBerry Bold with about 30 percent power in 90 minutes using Wi-Fi access points located nearby, according to an RCA official recorded on video by Geeky-Gadgets.com. The amount of charging time depends on a user’s proximity to the Wi-Fi hot spot.

The Airnergy unit stores the charge in an internal lithium battery, so you don’t necessarily have to be in a Wi-Fi hot spot to recharge your device. The device is about 2 in. by 3 in. in size and will sell for $39 to $49 this summer. RCA said it is developing a smaller version that would replace a battery inside a hand-held device and sell for about $60. That smaller version could ship in 2011.

Other wireless chargers

Demonstrations of wireless chargers have been a staple of CES for several years, and some products promised in 2008 have not materialized. Some products, such as the Dell Latitude Z laptop, allow charging by placing the laptop directly on a wireless charging stand. Fulton Innovation LLC, (I wrote about here) showed products and prototypes at CES. One Fulton technology concept powers a 12-watt light bulb from a transmitter placed 35 inches away. Powermat USA showed new wireless charging mats for handheld computers at prices ranging from $39 to $149, and the company’s CEO said Powermat has sold 750,000 devices since the company launched two months ago.

There is much skepticism over this product. The inverse-square law roughly says in this case that the signal would decrease in intensity inversely proportional to the square of the distance. Double the distance and signal strength drops by a fourth and so on. Thus at the distance at which most people find themselves from access points, the amount of energy available is minute.

Here is an article from SensorMag.com that describes how RF energy harvesting works.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| August 14, 2009
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Nokia Tries Wireless Electricity

Nokia Tries Wireless ElectricityIf someday the researchers at Nokia (NOK), are right you will be able to use wireless electricity to charge your mobile. Putting your cell phone in standby mode may no longer cause the dreaded vampire power. Vampire power is often described as pointlessly wasting electricity with little benefit other than a small red light and instant start-up.

Nokia logoAccording to an article in the UK’s Guardian, Nokia is developing a mobile phone charging system that is able to power itself on nothing more than ambient radiowaves that constantly surround us. The Guardian article points out that radiowaves power the old crystal radio sets and modern radio frequency identification (RFID) tags.

Nokia claims that its system is able to scavenge enough ambient electromagnetic radiation emitted from Wi-Fi transmitters, cell-phone antennas, TV towers, and other sources miles away to run a cell phone. Individually the energy available in each of these signals is minute, but by harvesting radio waves across a range of frequencies it all adds up, said Markku Rouvala, one of the researchers who developed the device at the Nokia Research Center in Cambridge, UK.

Nokia’s device uses a wide-band antenna and two very simple passive circuits. The design of the antenna and the receiver circuit makes it possible to pick up frequencies from 500 megahertz to 10 gigahertz and convert the electromagnetic waves into an electrical current. The second circuit is designed to feed this current to the battery to recharge it.

“Even if you are only getting microwatts (mW), you can still harvest energy, provided your circuit is not using more power than it’s receiving,” Rouvala told Technology Review. So far the researchers have been able to harvest up to 5 mW. Their next goal is to get in excess of 20 mW, enough power to keep a phone in standby mode indefinitely. but not enough to actually use the phone to make or receive a call the researcher says.  Rouvala says that his group is working towards a prototype that could harvest up to 50 mW of power, enough to slowly recharge a switched-off phone.

Earlier this year, Joshua Smith at Intel and Alanson Sample at the University of Washington, in Seattle, developed a temperature-and-humidity sensor that draws its power from the signal emitted by a 1.0-megawatt TV antenna 4.1 kilometers away. This only involved generating 60 mW.  Smith says that 50 mW could need around 1,000 strong signals and that an antenna capable of picking up such a range of frequencies would cause efficiency losses along the way.

Harry Ostaffe, head of marketing for Pittsburgh-based company Powercast, which sells a system for recharging sensors from about 15 meters away with a dedicated radio signal told Technology Review, “To get 50 milliwatts seems like a lot.”

If Nokia’s claims stand up, then it could push energy harvesting into mainstream consumer devices and improve their environmental footprint. 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.

According to Technology Review. 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.

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As I have chronicled in the past and here, wireless power is a good solution looking for a way to be implemented. Wireless power has now hit the Gartner “Hype-Cycle.” According to the July 2009 Gartner Hype-Cycle, Wireless Power has just entered the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” zone and is still 5-10 years from mainstream adoption. 

This technology holds many benefits to the environment (less wasted electricity) and user convenience (how many proprietary power adapters do you have?), it is yet to be seen if consumer demand can overcome the inertia of the status quo and the power of big money lobbying by the coal, nuclear and utilities. Right now my money is on the money.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| June 27, 2009
Comments Off on Wireless Electricity Gets Closer

Wireless Electricity Gets Closer

IntelWireless Electricity Gets Closer (INTC) has been working on wireless electricity technology for several years, which I wrote about earlier, that now works over longer distances. At its Intel Research Day at the Computer History Museum in Mt. View CA, on 06-18-2009, the company showed off a new variation of the idea that power can be transmitted through the air to run a speaker without any other power source.

wireless electricityIntel now calls the technology Wireless Resonant Energy Link (WREL). Intel’s goal of the WREL project is to cut the power cord. Building on principles proposed by MIT physicists in 2006. The WREL team has lit a 60W light bulb at a range of several feet and with 70% efficiency.

WREL works in a fashion similar to the old 1970’s Memorex commercial staring Ella Fitzgerald where a singer can shatter a glass by hitting its natural frequency, at which it absorbs energy efficiently. In the case of WREL, a coil of wire with a natural frequency around 10MHz takes the place of the glass, and a similar coil takes the place of the singer.

The technology uses two flat copper coils tuned to resonate at a particular frequency. One wire releases electromagnetic energy and the other picks it up in much the same way an opera singer can shatter a wine glass by singing at just the right pitch, said researcher Emily Cooper. The wireless electricity transmission shows the efficiency of 90 percent at distances of up to a meter, she said.

Intel hopes the technology will be useful for charging devices like netbooks or smartphones in a room without wires. Intel also predicts the technology could be used within devices such as a laptop.  to replace the fallible wires that connect laptop screens through a hinge, Cooper said

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Intel logoIntel admits that the next milestone for the WREL project is to build a rectifying circuit that can convert the RF power to DC power without upsetting the carefully tuned pair of coils. Intel has demonstrated they can charge a light bulb with 60W of wireless electricity which should be sufficient to charge a laptop.

However to power a laptop or charge a battery, Intel will need DC power, not a 10MHz AC signal. The need to drive down the power requirements for the next generation of computing devices is also helping drive Intel’s latest attempt to break into the UMPC process market with the Atom chips and the next-generation “Moorestown” processor which boasts lower energy consumption requirements. It is also notable that Intel has a stated long-term plan of 60watts power for mainstream desktop processors, down from a maximum consumption of 130 watts of the new Pentium Extreme Edition 840, according to Benson Inkley, a senior processor applications engineer, with Intel in an article at Tom’s Hardware.

While it seems that Intel is on a trajectory to cut the power requirements and costs of owning and operating a PC fleet, it will be a while. It is much more likely that Moorestown processors are going to be aided by the pending IEEE 802.3at POE+ specification which will allow up to at least 30W which can be used to charge devices. It is my guess that the reports of the demise of wired networking are greatly exaggerated until Intel figures out how to economically and safely deliver 60W through the vapor.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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