Wireless Power Harvesting for Cell Phones
Wouldn’t it be cool if you never had to charge your cell phone again? What if your phone was able to stay charged just by collecting the radio waves that are already flying around the air around you. That is the technology that Nokia is working on today.
The Nokia device will work on the same principles as a crystal radio set or radio frequency identification (RFID) tag: by converting electromagnetic waves into an electrical signal. This requires two passive circuits. “Even if you are only getting microwatts, you can still harvest energy, provided your circuit is not using more power than it’s receiving,” Rouvala says.
This is one of those technologies that will eventually show up in our lives and years later, we’ll be saying to ourselves, “Remember when we had to charge our cell phones? We used to have cradles and car chargers and habits in our lives just to make sure our phones were charged and you little whipper snappers come in here with your fancy self-charging phones.” Of course, by then, I’ll sound like an old miner and wave around a cane like I’m going to hit you with it.
It will be cool when it shows up, though!