back to article Samsung-backed gizmo may soon juice up your smartphone over the air

Wireless charging is becoming an ever more popular way to juice up consumer gadgets, but an international team of scientists may have figured out how to scrap the mat too. Research by the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology offers a way to wirelessly transfer power consistently over longer distances than conventional …

  1. cbars Bronze badge

    This is exciting, if they've got a working prototype over 40cm then I could see an office desk/monitor/laptop rig being the charge point, so your phone is charging even in your pocket. Ditto for a car arm rest.

    This could make things interesting. I assume the negativity toward it is due to the cost implications, but if someone can get wireless charging working at even 40% efficiency over 40cm then please, take my money.

    1. Lee D Silver badge

      I'm not sure that you want to have a beam of anything pointing at you to charge your phone.

      Anything directional (i.e. not really subject to the inverse square law) and of sufficient power is going to interfere with things. Everything from inducing a current in your credit cards in your wallet to generating all kinds of RF or reflections.

      Basically, this is achievable today. Get a large directional antenna and just point it at the "magic charging spot" by some magic dot-tracking method. But putting, say, even 10W down it is going to attract the attention of radio licensing agencies before long. Anything non-directional is subject to inverse-square law (so something 40cm away would need to be 1,600 times the power of something 1cm away). There's a reason that even directional antenna use - though it might come under power limits measured in Watts - isn't allowed if it allows a certain gain overall.

      To then harvest it without anything else in the path inducting a current from it is going to be really tricky. And you don't want to have the e-cig in your pocket ignite because you walked between a guy and his phone charger.

      The energies we're talking about, really the only viable method is very-close-contact induction and acceptance that there'll be some loss, or a conductive cable to "channel" it down so it's not going through the very insulating free-air.

      Inductance works great for electric toothbrushes, maybe a very low power phone, etc. Everything else, you really don't want to be inducing even targeted, directional beams of EM power towards. Especially when a 50p cable does the job at stupendous efficiency without side-effects.

      The low-power, harness-what's-there is more viable but you should be able to tell that even that's a bit of a cop-out. Sure, it'll keep, say, a wireless sensor blipping once a second, or find your lost car keys by having them suck up wifi energy and send out a short burst of data, but that's about it.

      Honestly, you may as well just point a laser at the center of a QR code using a movable arm. That's basically what you're doing, but with RF, but at least a laser beam doesn't spread out, induce currents, etc. in surrounding materials. And you would have a chance of cutting out instantly if the laser detects that it's reflecting back or lost the QR code because something's got in the way.

      Basically charge-by-high-power-laser is more viable and I could probably make you one today. 10W would be quite dangerous, though, and a bit naff for charging.

      1. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
        Alert

        @Lee D

        Basically charge-by-high-power-laser is more viable and I could probably make you one today. 10W would be quite dangerous, though, and a bit naff for charging.

        You want more power?

        https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/20/euro_laser_cannon_research/

        https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/24/qinetic_dragonworks_laser_cannon_test_centre/

        icon: can we have a laser warning triangle?

      2. MachDiamond Silver badge

        "Anything directional (i.e. not really subject to the inverse square law) "

        Directionality has nothing to do with the inverse square law. You do start off with some advantages by not spraying RF to places where it won't do you any good.

  2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    Science-fiction, here we come

    Step by step, minute advancement by minuscule improvement, we will some day attain the lofty 21st Century promised to us by Hollywood fifty years ago.

    But right now wireless charging is something that Greenpeace should be as much up in arms about as nuclear power, because with all the energy loss in transmitting in such a fashion, we're going to need more nuclear reactors, and soon.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Science-fiction, here we come

      So, you move the device and it stops charging? WTF?

      A charging cable is simple to plug in and you can carry on using the phone while it is charging.

      Is that so wrong?

      Have we got that lazy/idle?

      1. Avatar of They
        Thumb Up

        Re: Science-fiction, here we come

        Not lazy, but you can't sell a wire as the 'latest' technology and get idiots raving about it.

        Imagine the latest i device or samsung mobile phablet having the 'best' in mobile charging technology if you then ship it with a wire. :)

  3. Kaltern

    I wonder if this tech could be adapted to simply charge all batteries in a room - remote controls, mice, vibrators.. you know the sorts of things.

    And I wonder if the day will ever come when 240v can be somehow transmitted safely...

    1. Mr Youmustbe Fuckingjoking

      240V is transmitted safely all around my house already. Oh, you meant wirelessly.

  4. Flakk
    Trollface

    If You Thought the Wailing Over Cell Phones and Brain Tumors Was Bad...

    ...just wait until they find out about cell phones recharging wirelessly using microwaves. *barely contained snicker*

    RUSSIAN microwaves! *unrestrainable guffaws*

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's only a matter of time

    Soon I shall be able to shoot lightning from my fingertips.

    1. Kaltern

      Re: It's only a matter of time

      That's shocking use of the National Grid.

    2. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

      Re: It's only a matter of time

      Soon I shall be able to shoot lightning from my fingertips.

      That one's easy (for a somewhat limited version of 'lightning'). All you need is:

      One 13-year old science student.

      One milk-crate (for standing on - insulation and all that)

      One Van Der Graaf generator (not the prog band - the belt-driven thingy).

      Hey presto! Electricity coming out your fingertips!

      For added bonus points, add a nearby gas tap and an unlit Bunsen Burner..

  6. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    "...the strength of the field is inversely proportional to the distance..."

    Oh, has the Inverse *Square* Law been repealed?

    If so, then we just need to slowly back away from the Source, all while increasing the size of our all-enveloping spherical Sink. By doing so, thanks to Scaling Laws, the total power at the Sink would be proportional to distance. Energy Crisis solved. Yay!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "...the strength of the field is inversely proportional to the distance..."

      That's what I thought. Give me a klystron, a couple of antennae and four gallium arsenide diodes and I can provide you with some DC at a distance. But no matter how cleverly I let the transmitter know the location of the receiver, I cannot get more energy into the receiving antenna than is allowed by the electric field strength and the dispersion of the beam. Which, for practical antennae, is pretty large. The area available in a mobile phone for a suitable antenna is not great. At 40cm with a decent horn on my klyston I could probably get a half way decent transfer, but people might not like the array on the phone. At 4 metres with 1% of the energy available, either I'm going to be using a microwave oven to transmit or the rate of charge will be minuscule.

      The research may well be useful but I still regard any kind of practical remote wireless charging as in the realms of science fiction, somewhere between a moon colony and a space elevator.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "...the strength of the field is inversely proportional to the distance..."

        I still regard any kind of practical remote wireless charging as in the realms of science fiction

        Indeed it is. But you won't be surprised to know there's a whole load of snake oil companies claiming they can do this, and they're each snorting up a fat line of VC cash, as well as looking to hook potential customers (potential customers who can't do basic physics, at any rate).

        In my last job, my employer started sniffing around such technologies, and threw the fat end of £1m at an internal project to consider the viability. When I made my views clear (very similar to your post), I got told to shut up, and the whole project ambled on, with the participants getting expenses paid trips to conventions in Vegas and meeting the "Silicon Valley entrepreneurs" behind the schemes, with marketing commissioning glossy videos and "market research" that showed wealthy middle class housewives declaring how a self-charging iPhone was somewhere on a par with the second coming. Eventually the company gave up, not because they realised that the laws of physics meant it wouldn't be technically achievable before perhaps 2050 (if ever), but simply because having assumed that it would work (!) they couldn't create a viable commercial model that made them any money.

      2. Jeffrey Nonken

        Re: "...the strength of the field is inversely proportional to the distance..."

        "I still regard any kind of practical remote wireless charging as in the realms of science fiction..."

        Funny, I was just thinking the same thing about cell phones and the internet. But I was born before 1960.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: "...the strength of the field is inversely proportional to the distance..."

          "Funny, I was just thinking the same thing about cell phones and the internet. But I was born before 1960."

          And flying cars, and atomic ovens in every home, and hyperspace space travel, and time travel, and weather control, and Amazons from Mars, and whatnot. I'm sure there are still plenty of scifi things from your youth that are still just that, and will likely stay that way.

          That some things could be made has zero influence on the realization of other things.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: "...the strength of the field is inversely proportional to the distance..."

          "Funny, I was just thinking the same thing about cell phones and the internet. But I was born before 1960."

          In the 1960s, Raymond Baxter* notwithstanding, Maxwell's Equations were sufficiently old that any instructed person (even a 6th former who had read Metatopia**) knew that there was no intrinsic reason why an Internet and sophisticated hand held radios should not exist. But that same 6th former had done enough experiments (including with klystrons) to have a pretty good handle on the inverse square law and understand why Tesla's experiments were never going to be the basis of an electrical distribution system.

          *As an American ("cell phones") you won't have heard of Baxter. He fronted a TV science program and told people why handheld computers would never exist. They hadn't heard of, or hadn't understood, Moore's Law, which already explained that before long they would.

          **The author of Metatopia imagined a future socialist/libertarian Britain which had a kind of audio Internet, including forecasting music distribution, Wikipedia and buying things on line. Not bad for the late 1950s.

    2. MachDiamond Silver badge

      Re: "...the strength of the field is inversely proportional to the distance..."

      "Energy Crisis solved. Yay!"

      Yes, but only for perfectly spherical cows.

  7. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    "...scavenging energy from sources such as Wi-Fi..."

    If this is about charging your Smartphone, then these boffins might wish to move their analysis from the conceptual to the numerical.

    Typically, there's only about a watt at the router's antenna socket, and it's certainly not continuous duty cycle. A watt is equivalent to 5v x 200mA, but that would require a direct cable and duty cycle hack. End result, this is heading towards 10mA on a good day, and 300 hour charging time.

    It's reassuring that boffins other than AI are also thick.

  8. ecofeco Silver badge

    So... Tesla then?

    What a time to be alive indeed! Decades after Tesla invented it.

    Progress marches on! (after some stumble, tumbles and falls)

  9. Tony W

    Can anyone explain this please

    in terms understandable by an ordinary engineer reasonably conversant with electronics?

    1. MachDiamond Silver badge

      Re: Can anyone explain this please

      Here's a similar power beaming scheme that Dave at EEVBlog reviews. The one he takes apart is ultrasonic, but it's close enough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8dqzVlhFkA

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    5G

    ...over time, directed high energy beams of various bandwidths for data and/or power transmission will cause health problems for living things...

    Mine's the (earthed) tin foil hat.

  11. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
    Pirate

    This Comes Up Every Now & Again

    Where (BBC) technicians were trying to track down the reason for a large radio shadow on one transmitter.

    This turned out to be someone who lived close to the mast using the power received through a large aerial:

    To heat his domestic hot water. I believe the gentleman in question was prosecuted for causing radio interference,

    A farmer running his domestic\cowshed lighting prosecuted for stealing electricity.

    Although both the stories may very well be apocryphal or at least wildly inaccurate.

    1. John Mangan

      Re: This Comes Up Every Now & Again

      Upvote for the HHGTTG allusion.

  12. Ian Joyner Bronze badge

    Almost nothing to do with Samsung

    This story seemed to have almost nothing to do with Samsung. Maybe Register has reported it badly, or just used it as an excuse to talk up how good Samsung is.

  13. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    So... in order to make this work, you either have to throw around a lot of energy to make sure a little energy actually reaches your smartphone, losing lots of energy in the transfer, potentially microwaving anything getting in the way; or place your smartphone at a dedicated spot for charging, not moving it until it's charged. Like you'd do when using a docking station. Right.

  14. strum

    Phew! Anything to avoid the back-breaking labour of... plugging in a USB.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "Phew! Anything to avoid the back-breaking labour of... plugging in a USB."

      I think the problem is that for some people anything involving a socket - even a reversible one - is soon going to result in socket-breaking.

      Last year I went to PC World because it was Sunday and I had a sudden pressing need for a mini-USB cable due to a visitor. They didn't have one, but they had so many Apple cables that I suddenly realised that Apple cable breakage must be a major profit driver for somebody.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I usually watch TV news when I want to see PR BS presented as The Future.

    A somewhat disappointing article.

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