Very interesting.
From Townhall.com
The MIT system is about 40 to 45 percent efficient _ meaning that most of the energy from the charging device doesn’t make it to the light bulb. Soljacic believes his system needs to get twice as efficient to be on par with charging the chemical batteries in portable gadgets.
Also, the copper coils that transmit the power are about 2 feet wide for now _ too big to be feasible for, say, laptops. And the 7-foot range of this wireless handoff could be increased _ presumably so that one charging device could automatically power all the gadgets in a room.
Soljacic believes all those improvements are within reach. The next step is to fire up more than just light bulbs, perhaps a Roomba robotic vacuum or a laptop.
Soljacic’s team stresses that the “magnetic coupling” process involved in WiTricity is safe on humans and other living things. And in the initial experiments on the light bulb, no harm came to the cell phones, electronic equipment and credit cards in the room _ though more research on that is needed.
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On the Net:
Soljacic’s Web page: http://tinyurl.com/ytz2t3
Future Tech Ping.
This could be significant in several areas. Isolated power supplies are big business.