Don't look a gift house in a Romany caravan
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Fujitsu working on touch charging system
WIRELESS CHARGER accessories for mobile devices are expected by Fujitsu lab's boffins to appear on the high street by 2012.
Designed to charge handheld devices, Fujitsu's technology uses "magnetic resonance". The company states that this enables more compact and more efficient power transmitters and receivers.
"The drawbacks [of other tech] are that the method only works over short distances, and the power transmitter and power receiver need to be in alignment, so it is effectively no different than using a charging station with a wired connection," Fujitsu said, adding that its technology had the potential to power something as large as a car.
The company also held out the prospect of transmitting energy over several meters. The magnetic resonance method uses a coil and capacitor as a resonator. It's the resonator that enables the transmission of electricity over a range of up to several meters.
With this distance charging a single transmitter can power multiple receiving devices. Developments are under way for a broad range of potential applications, charging everything from portable electronics to electric cars. µ
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After lengthy review of Fujitsu's nearly opaque text, I was able to determine that by "magnetic resonance" they mean RF power transmission, as some guy from Eastern Europe did over a 100 years ago. Their claim for advance seems to be in writing a program that (maybe) uses Monte Carlo optimization, perhaps from a selection of standardized components, and they're bragging that it runs in only ten minutes on a 3.3GHz machine, while whatever previous system took 24 hours, hence the 1/150th time claim. My calculation is that ten minutes is 1/144 of 24 hours, making me somewhat question their mathematical ability.
Anyhoo, the only interest there is to guess whether the translation is simply lousy or the engineers were trying to impress dimwitted executives.
As to the claim that it can help charging electric cars: ridiculous, and the topical tie-in is much of why I think it's just baloney. Assume 3KVA are needed to charge the battery, then the claimed 85% efficiency wastes 450VA right off the bat. However, it appears that they're only calculating *transmission* efficiency and not the total system. Since Class C (or D) RF transmitters hit only about 90% efficiency, there's another 300VA gone, so overall it'd be wasting 750VA, enough to run the typical house most times, *merely* to avoid *wires*. Sheesh.