Power from the Air: Device Captures Ambient Electromagnetic Energy to Drive Small Electronic Devices

So there we have it...

The energy from the "ether" IS there..

In da face!!

Researchers have discovered a way to capture and harness energy transmitted by such sources as radio and television transmitters, cell phone networks and satellite communications systems.

And then sum perhaps....

By scavenging this ambient energy from the air around us, the technique could provide a new way to power networks of wireless sensors, microprocessors and communications chips.

SOURCE

hi op
funny how tesla demonstrated this over 100 yrs ago

This capability has been around for a long time with the crystal radio as one example. Tesla done a heap of work promoting this field. It is interesting to see the low production costs to tap into it and development of other bits to help utilise it further. There is the potential for a fair amount of energy if it can receive a very wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum concurrently instead of being limited to small parts of this spectrum.

but the common man will be allowed a mere couple of milli-watts ,,
to charge his smart surveillance phone

Originally posted by Miccey
So there we have it...

The energy from the "ether" IS there..

This isn't energy from aether Miccey, it's energy from radio transmitter towers that are using millions of watts of energy to power the transmitters.

This device will scavenge a few milliwatts of this energy at best, and they apparently are at power levels far lower than that now. So using a million watts of power to generate a milliwatt at the receiver not only isn't energy from the aether, but it's not the ultimate in energy efficiency either. That's over 99.99% inefficient.

It does have some practical applications if they can get the voltage high enough to power electronic devices or recharge batteries. I think not getting enough voltage has been the main reason it hasn't been used much in the type of applications they describe, and they apparently have yet to demonstrate the ability to get sufficient voltage and power, but technically it should be possible with a large enough antenna.

Originally posted by kwakakev
This capability has been around for a long time with the crystal radio as one example.

Exactly what I was thinking, and how old is the crystal radio?

This type of power utilization is not new, my grandparents were using it. Here's a patent application from 2009:

www.faqs.org...
As the commenter says: "the primary context of the above information describes a basic radio receiver. This is well known technology and I cannot understand how this would be considered for a patent."

The new part is that better antenna designs may allow for things other than crystal radios to be powered. So it's sort of like a radio receiver on steroids. I wonder how big the antennas will need to be to provide useful power?

Originally posted by CitizenNum287119327
but the common man will be allowed a mere couple of milli-watts ,,
to charge his smart surveillance phone

You wouldn't want TPTB to lose track of your every activity over something like a dead battery, would you?

reply to post by Arbitrageur

This isn't energy from aether Miccey, it's energy from radio transmitter towers that are using millions of watts of energy to power the transmitters.

There is also energy from the sun and the rest of the universe. While the signal strength is not as high as being next to a transmitter, there is a lot of noise on all the channels. That is all that is required for a AC signal.

Oh crap, i forgot..
ATS is unable to see the bigger picture..
Sorry..

ITS there...
Now we can "scavange"...Soon we can have TERRAWATS...

Better now?

Originally posted by Miccey
Now we can "scavange"...Soon we can have TERRAWATS...

Better now?

Source?

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Originally posted by Miccey
Now we can "scavange"...Soon we can have TERRAWATS...

Better now?

Source?

You want a source, hmmm...

Hang on..

Source 1

Source 2

Source 3

Source 4

More..???

PS: And i did say, the lack of being able to see the bigger picture.

reply to post by Miccey

Those sources don't say anything about terawatts.

The source in the OP says a few hundred microwatts and maybe a milliwatt in the future.

I don't think you understand the technology.

Maybe i dont..
But i can put aggriculture a 100 years ago together
with Combines to day...Its called EVOLUTION...

And i dont think i EVER metioned any TIMESPAN in my post..
All i said was, soon...Soon is relative. Soon for you is perhaps
a year or 10. Soon for anyone else could be 100 of years..

Originally posted by Miccey

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Originally posted by Miccey
Now we can "scavange"...Soon we can have TERRAWATS...

Better now?

Source?

You want a source, hmmm...

Hang on..

Source 1

Source 2

Source 3

Source 4

More..???

PS: And i did say, the lack of being able to see the bigger picture.

edit on 9-7-2011 by Miccey because: (no reason given)

How about trying to see at least the small picture?

These Wikipedia "sources" are nothing. They say nothing about electricity, power or terawatts.

I think you are a little confused. Did you even read the OP?

The Microchip Corp has had a range of devices available for a while now that harvest their operating energy from the environment but the advancement isn't in the amount of energy collected, but in the miniscule energy requirements of the devices. They are used as wireless data acquisition stations that transmit the data up to around 50' back to a central control station. Very useful but hardly earth-shattering technology apart from the fact it the remote stations never need battery replacement and solar cell + battery setups are still far more flexible solutions. The 'harvesting' only succeeds well in electromagnetically noisy places like urban environments etc. and the collected energy is virtually all coming from man-made sources like radio, tv, radar, power lines etc transmissions, not exactly natural aether energy per se

Quite a few people over the decades have gone to jail for putting together copper coils that gave them free energy.

A man had some copper coils in the attic of his house and was actually getting electricity from the powerlines...even though he wasn't connected to the power lines. Think it was in the 1980's I saw it in the newspaper.


It's very very easy to build a receiver to receive free energy from what other people are transmitting. But it's illegal!

This is not future energy solution tech,OP. This is a good thing surely but its output is low and is not going to rise dramatically in the future. But there will be much more powerful (almost) free energy solutions. Fusion a certainty, Earth rotation usage a possibility,Solar panels in space if no other will work and ctr.
This is not it. Think logically - life uses all energy available to it freely. Thermal energy, chemical reactions, photosynthesis. No life form,at least on Earth, can use energy from "ether". So either it is not free or it does not exist.

reply to post by Pervius

It's very very easy to build a receiver to receive free energy from what other people are transmitting. But it's illegal!

What do you mean illegal? Under what law exactly?

I ve read a lot about Tesla and I have two theories on his wireless power system.
It's not energy from the ether, I feel it has more to do with harmonics. Wardencliff tower would of pusled out power on a certain harmonic frequency and people would have there "atennas" tuned into that frequency and charge batteries/ Large capacitors. And that is I belive the key "HARMONICS" , you could porbaly get power from any frequency but when you use harmonics you hit the "sweet spot" and then energy transfers faster more naturaly because its on the "same wave level", "in sync", whatever you want to call it.

Take a Tuning fork tuned to A and whack it against a table it will start oscillating bring another one into proximity and it will oscillate at the same rate, bring another 5 in and they will do the same. This is how MIT's and intels wireless power systems work. They state on there videos that the end user would have a coil hidden behind plasterboard wall or a picture frame and that would be plugged into the mains, then your electrical devices have a coil tuned into the same "haramonic frequency" plugged into them (on the back of the mobile phone they demonstrated) when they come into proximity of the coil that is pluged into the mains they get the electricty wirelessly. Heres the thing, they also stated that if you had your phone just on the edge of the proximity of the main coil it would boost the distance to other devices, similar to a wifi network booster.

Now my question: Why are we not using the harmonic frequencies the sun must be blasting out? Are we not afraid of the sun damaging our transformers and electrical equiptment, with what? Feather pillows? No electricaly charged particles bombard us overloading the electrics!

Now for theory 2

I saw the pic of that volcano erupting the other week, you know the one with all the lighting around it striking the main plume. I googled "why does lighting appear around eruptions.
after reading a few threads it seems the general theory is that the eruption very quickly heats up the atmosesphere directly above and with it hits cold particles it creates a charge and voila Mighty thor is in the house throwing bolts of lighting around like a mad man. This also got me thinking about what tesla said about wardencliff tower. When he powered up it created a great lighting storm over and around waardencliff and that he blew all his capacitors due to overload and had to build new bigger better ones. What if Tesla used a transmiter to broadcast a microfrequency directly above the tower acting like our modern day microwave ovens, and super heating quickly the atmosesphere over the tower thus creating the lighting storm.

My question ? Why dont people open there eyes and mouths and start to see what they are rubbing in our noses (harrp anyone, wireless power invented by MIT and INTEl i think not) and use our mouths to speak up and demand to be heard. The energy companies are once again hiking up the price of fuels with winter just over the horizon, or do the energy companies know there monopoly is up and the secrets from the ages are upon us all once again. Nothing new is under the sun after...........

Narrow minded sheple...
BIG picture..

Look with your mind, not your eyes..

See how far we have come in just 150 years. Were do you think we !!"COULD"!! be
in another 100?!?

Stop beeing so frikin naive (should say NEGATIVE) and soup in the whole, not just tidbits...

POTENTIAL is the key...

Originally posted by Miccey
So there we have it...

The energy from the "ether" IS there..

In da face!!

Researchers have discovered a way to capture and harness energy transmitted by such sources as radio and television transmitters, cell phone networks and satellite communications systems.

So the energy is from the "ether" or is it from the coal power plant that powered the radio/television transmitters?

I'm pretty sure this post might as well be thrown into the ether, but...

Well, firstly, I'll say that while I don't know specifically what Tesla meant when he was talking about getting power from the ether, it almost certainly wasn't this. In his day, there was far less electromagnetic radiation to 'scavenge', as the technology described in this article does. Tesla may well have been able to conceive of this same idea, but it would have done him scarcely more good than if someone had conceived of it a thousand years ago; there simply wasn't enough to scavenge at the time.

This technology also isn't any sort of 'free energy', for basically the reasons the poster right before me said; the electromagnetic radiaton from cell phone towers, radio waves, and so on was produced by energy that came from the grid; powerplants and so on. It's more like recycling waste energy than anything else.

As others have said, however, the idea isn't really that new. People have been trying to scavenge 'wasted' energy like this for quite some time. I've seen ideas for scavenging waste body heat and harnessing the mechanical energy of bodily movements, for example. This technology is a lot better, however, because it's electric and can be made a lot smaller. It's significance seems to me to be how easily it can be produced; they say it can be printed on paper-like stuff on circuits.