New Printable Antenna Can Harvest Ambient Energy To Power Small Electronics

New Printable Antenna Can Harvest Ambient Energy To Power Small Electronics

www.popsci.com

A new ultra-wideband antenna printed on paper or plastic can harvest ambient energy, enabling wireless sensors to tap into electromagnetic currents in the air around them. The device captures energy from a wide spectrum of frequencies, converts it to direct current, and stores it in capacitors or batteries.


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I would love for this device to work.... because part of me really wants to believe in over-unity, free energy, invisible force shields, tractor beams, anti-gravity, and faster than light propulsion.

But suppose these things actually do work. Suppose a bunch of people buy them. Wouldn't they cause a lot of interference and blockage for wireless communications? Microwave and radio transmissions are designed to transmit data, not provide power. You would probably get more power from a photovoltaic cell of the same size

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I read about this a few years ago but the problem I saw with it was the frequency of the electricity … it would take one hell of a rectifier to harness it into something useful.

Originally posted by joyride0187
But suppose these things actually do work.

There is no doubt about the "working". Scavenging free energy from the air is what makes crystal radios work, and depending on how you define it, all the RFID tags.
The problem is lack of applications. You need something relatively HUGE to generate just a few milliwatts.

The crystal radio is an obvious one - something a hundred feet is size is barely enough to function at all, as a radio.
What exactly are you going to power with something a thousand times smaller?

reply to post by SirMike


It's like Tesla's little circuit that collects current from the ambient air (Which are really electrons that have come through the earth from the big electron core in the centre of our hollow earth)

Originally posted by joyride0187


I would love for this device to work.... because part of me really wants to believe in over-unity, free energy, invisible force shields, tractor beams, anti-gravity, and faster than light propulsion.

But suppose these things actually do work. Suppose a bunch of people buy them. Wouldn't they cause a lot of interference and blockage for wireless communications? Microwave and radio transmissions are designed to transmit data, not provide power. You would probably get more power from a photovoltaic cell of the same size

www.popsci.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

No such thing as over unity. Devices like this simply tap into energy that already exists. It is free energy in the respect that it does not have to be created by man.

Friggin Awesome, Tesla's dream come true?

But are there possible side effects from using energy around us and containing it somewhere else?
Might that not affect room temperatures for example? Might that not increase energy costs during the winter time?

Tesla is turning in his grave right now....

Originally posted by joyride0187


I would love for this device to work.... because part of me really wants to believe in over-unity, free energy, invisible force shields, tractor beams, anti-gravity, and faster than light propulsion.

Then this will be a grave disappointment to you, because it's none of the above. It's a little receiver, sort of like a crystal radio, only not tuned for any one frequency. The power available is miniscule.

But suppose these things actually do work. Suppose a bunch of people buy them. Wouldn't they cause a lot of interference and blockage for wireless communications? Microwave and radio transmissions are designed to transmit data, not provide power. You would probably get more power from a photovoltaic cell of the same size

It doesn't work that way. Once you're in the far-field of the wave, it's all uncoupled. I can remove 100% of the energy of the field here, and it doesn't do diddly to the power density over there. But. You also have to understand that all the energy that's available to your aperture is related to the inverse square of the distance from each radiator, the size of the aperture, the efficiency of the aperture at each frequency, the loss in the diode bandgap and leakage and those are big limiting factors. The power's not coming from nowhere, it's the sum of all the RF power from transmitters that are in close enough range to this thing to contribute any real power, which isn't all that much even in a city, but it's beans in the burbs or the country.

You're talking microwatts of power here, at best.

reply to post by Bedlam


Hi, I think your appraisal of the device is exactly like the crystal set. What I have wondered is, if there is a way to somehow amplify the received signal to a point that matches the original transmitters output??

Regards.

Originally posted by Surreptitious
reply to post by Bedlam

 

Hi, I think your appraisal of the device is exactly like the crystal set. What I have wondered is, if there is a way to somehow amplify the received signal to a point that matches the original transmitters output??

Regards.

Amplification requires power. More power than the output of the amplifier. So, no, not in the sense that there's some magic way to put in a microwatt of power here, and with no other power input, out comes a few megawatts.

I think this article is very misleading. This is NOT new technology. There are plans and devices already for sale on the internet, and they are very easy to make. Like already stated, this is basically a crystal radio.

...and it is illegal!

All they are doing is using the electromagnetic waves in the air (radio waves) to move the electrons in the antenna, and that is electricity. If you get a long electrical wire and hold it up like an antenna, there already exists energy in the wire. It's that simple. Almost all wires everywhere pick up this energy...

That is basically all a radio does. Depending on the size of the antenna, you get a different radio station. When you select a radio station on a radio all you are doing is adjusting the amount of antenna you want to use. Of course, if you wrap the wire around a coil it increases the strength of the signal. Then you add a diode so it only captures half of the wave, then hook up some ear plugs, and you have a radio.

The problem is, you are using energy that is output via radio stations, and cell phone towers, and television transmitters. This has already been deemed illegal because you are stealing energy from the transmitters, and it actually reduces the power of the radio transmissions.

Even if all radio stations, cell phone towers, television transmitters, etc. were to cease to exist, you could pick up stray radio waves emitted by the Sun and Stars... then that would be legal I think... I don't know how that works because how can you tell where the radio waves are coming from?

Anyway, Tesla didn't exactly invent this, just so you know.

reply to post by Bedlam


Thanks for the reply, that's a real shame, would be really neat if there was a way to somehow amplify the signal in an iterative type manner, enabling the wave to be bounced back and forth, similar to a laser.

Regards.

Originally posted by gift0fpr0phecy
...and it is illegal!

Not at all.

All they are doing is using the electromagnetic waves in the air (radio waves) to move the electrons in the antenna, and that is electricity.

That part's sort of true...

That is basically all a radio does. Depending on the size of the antenna, you get a different radio station. When you select a radio station on a radio all you are doing is adjusting the amount of antenna you want to use. Of course, if you wrap the wire around a coil it increases the strength of the signal. Then you add a diode so it only captures half of the wave, then hook up some ear plugs, and you have a radio.

That part's sort of not...

The problem is, you are using energy that is output via radio stations, and cell phone towers, and television transmitters. This has already been deemed illegal because you are stealing energy from the transmitters, and it actually reduces the power of the radio transmissions.

Absolutely incorrect. Inside the near field zone, you can load down the transmitter's output. In the far field, the wave is uncoupled from the transmitter. No amount of loading there will change the loading on the transmitter - you can intercept the part of the field that crosses your aperture, but doing so has no effect on anything else. This is also why near field RFID doesn't work at a distance.

Originally posted by Surreptitious
reply to post by Bedlam

 

Thanks for the reply, that's a real shame, would be really neat if there was a way to somehow amplify the signal in an iterative type manner, enabling the wave to be bounced back and forth, similar to a laser.

Regards.

Lasers (some of them, anyway) do this, but you also have to supply external energy to "pump" the laser and create the population inversion. Sort of similar to the amplifier question - you never get but a fraction out that you put in.

In this case, you can't get more out of it than crosses the antenna aperture. There's no way to get more, because that's all there is.

There's a damn good reason as to why there is ambient energy around us. It is not there for us to exploit with machines.

Originally posted by Dimitri Dzengalshlevi
There's a damn good reason as to why there is ambient energy around us. It is not there for us to exploit with machines.

It's really handy that it keeps us from being frozen into little rocks at absolute zero. This doesn't seem to be a threat to it.

Originally posted by Bedlam

Originally posted by Dimitri Dzengalshlevi
There's a damn good reason as to why there is ambient energy around us. It is not there for us to exploit with machines.

It's really handy that it keeps us from being frozen into little rocks at absolute zero. This doesn't seem to be a threat to it.

I'm not talking about simple protons hitting the Earth from the sun. There's energy transferred between organisms. In our case, we transfer it subconciously to other humans as some form of "connected" communication to at least sense each other's presence. And what about ghosts and what not? They still exist without physical forms, and use energy to do it.

To just drain ambient energy from our environment is just another pathetic, ignorant attempt to exploit nature by empirical-minded people who find it impossible to understand something that is beyond the five physical senses.

You know what happens when we use up ambient energy on Earth? We end up like Mars: desolate landscape without a trace of life or its ecosystems.

We might as well just throw people into a furnace for fuel

reply to post by Bedlam


What is the difference between ambient energy and stray electrical pollution? Could the two be the same thing or related to each other?

Originally posted by Dimitri Dzengalshlevi
I'm not talking about simple protons hitting the Earth from the sun. There's energy transferred between organisms. In our case, we transfer it subconciously to other humans as some form of "connected" communication to at least sense each other's presence. And what about ghosts and what not? They still exist without physical forms, and use energy to do it.

Well, there's heat energy that can transfer to other organisms - anything over absolute zero does it. And sound energy, if you make noise. Not a lot past that. Ghosts don't exist.

To just drain ambient energy from our environment is just another pathetic, ignorant attempt to exploit nature by empirical-minded people who find it impossible to understand something that is beyond the five physical senses.

In this case, it's an empirical (i.e. real) device that rectifies radio noise. So it won't have any effect on ghosts - they'll be safe. Only devices that can capture bogons would affect ghosts - as ghosts have a high level of bogusity.