This five-cell metamaterial array developed at Duke University has a power-harvesting efficiency of 36.8 percen -- comparable to a solar cell. Credit: Duke University
This five-cell metamaterial array developed at Duke University has a power-harvesting efficiency of 36.8 percen -- comparable to a solar cell. Credit: Duke University
Ping!.............
Galt ping!
Cool.
Very cool. I also wonder if you ‘turned up the heat’ if this could somehow be used to be a EM dampener for avoiding detection.
That's nice.
How many watts?
But can you charge an RV battery with it?
The universe is Avery energetic place. Harvest the energy of the Big Bang?
Incremental improvement, not news.
....for more, Google “rectenna”
Hmmmm..I could bake a potato in my microwave and recharge my cell phone at the same time.
Wasn’t tesla working on a device to collect and use static electricity when he passed on?
I think I would go for the motor that works on magnetism.
http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/Howard_Johnson_Motor/
Watch the Big $$$ power companies buy the patents, and kill it deader than Vince Foster in Fort Marcy park!
I briefly looked into the idea of a passive receiving antenna on the nearby hilltop with a cable leading to a passive transmitting antenna located in the basement.
The problem I saw was that the FCC would probably get on my case for having re-transmitted this signal and the pager company would also be concerned because the receiving antenna would create an area of low signal strength behind the antenna, perhaps depriving other customers of the paging company from receiving their signals.
I can see a similar problem with the devices being suggested in this article. If a room full of people are soaking up the energy from a Wi-Fi there might be just that much less for the folks expecting a connection to the internet. I see much regulation ahead.
to convert microwaves into 7.3V of electrical energy. By comparison, Universal Serial Bus (USB) chargers for small electronic devices provide about 5V of power.
Oooooo, volts. How about power instead.
Consider a powerful AM station like WLW (50 kilowatt transmit power). At 1 km away, assuming no atmospheric absorption and and omnidirectional pattern (not true but good for a first estimate), you would have an energy flux of about 4 milliwatts per square meter. Now consider that most of the transmitters they are talking about are in the milliwatt to watt range instead of 50 kW.
Compare that to solar which has an energy flux of about 1 kilowatt / square meter at ground level on a sunny day.
They mention vibrations being useful to create power. I wonder if wind power could be used to vibrate materials that are attached to dynamos to create power verses using spinning turbines that kill birds! Imagine “wires” with a series of attached discs that “flutter” as the wind passes thru. The wire transmits all that kinetic energy to a sub dynamo that creates current which is collected via huge capacitors then sent out onto the grid . The discs could be connected by guide wires so that they flutter with some coherency to increase efficiency of the kinetic energy to be transferred. The height of the unit and/or the use of multiple grids of these strings in a collector allow a scaling of power collected per unit allowing decent power collection in low breeze conditions and vent dampeners could be used to moderate flows in potentially damaging high wind events.
Now my betters might could use math to tell one if such a system could be made to produce power efficiently based on equipment costs; but it seems to me that any power produced at all is better than no power at all when a shtf knocks out services over a wide area.
There is power in a plucked string of a violin that can sooth the soul. Perhaps a power system comprised of “wind plucked strings” connected to electrical dynamos can be scaled up to provide a useful niche in off the grid power production systems. Perhaps we could call such a system a “harp” system, with no relation to the “spook system” the military runs.
IIRC, Tesla showed a famous bulbous nosed banker this technology and when the banker was told he couldn’t put a meter on every receiver and make money that way, the banker dropped his interest in Tesla’s technological genius.
We used to wrap a copper wire ‘round an oatmeal box and rectify the signal with a crystal doohickey and listened to radio stations from around the world. Now they invented a new fangled way of doing the same darn thing. Betcha it’ll cost more too!
NICE Christmas present