Along the road that leads to wireless electricity, or “witricity” there is an important new travel companion: a circuit developed by researchers at Duke University capable of capturing energy from sound and wifi signals with an efficiency close to that of solar cells.
It is a small device that uses 5 copper and glass fiber conductors connected in a circuit through 5 channels made with a metamaterial. The circuit 'captures' energy from the aforementioned sources, converting it into 7.3V electrical energy (to get an idea, consider that cell phone charging cables provide 5V energy).
“We work to achieve the greatest possible efficiency,” says Allen Hawkes, one of the project managers. “The properties of metamaterials do not allow them to be exploited with the design of current antennas. Inserting the power of metamaterials into a cell phone would allow us to keep it charged simply by bringing it to an area covered by the Wifi signal, and in the future simply to an area covered by the telephone signal."
In other words, cell phones that never drain the battery.
The research is published in detail in the journal Applied Physics Letters.
