Generate power from thin air! An innovative new device developed by a former UK science minister can theoretically charge a mobile device or other electronics hardware constantly—and at no additional cost—simply by taking unused radio waves out of the air and converting them to a usable power source.
As Engadget and The Telegraph reported earlier this week, the device is known as Freevolt, and it was created by Drayson Technologies, a company that was founded by Lord Paul Drayson. It converts ambient radio frequency (RF) signals into energy that is sufficient for powering smaller electronic devices, including smart-home sensors and wearable devices such as Fitbits.
Lord Drayson, who served as science minister from 2008 to 2010, explained to The Telegraph that companies have been trying for many years to develop a means to harvest energy from WiFi or cellular network signals, but the fact that RF signals provide a minute amount of energy made it difficult to produce a charge efficient enough to power electronics.
So how does Freevolt work?
Freevolt is the first commercially available technology that successfully harnesses radio waves without the need for a dedicated transmitter, he explained. It functions using a three-part process. First, a multi-band antenna collects RF energy from sources within the 0.5-5GHz range.
It then feeds that energy through a highly-efficient rectifier that converts it into DC electricity. Finally, this power is boosted, stored, and delivered through a power management model. While the method does not produce enough juice to keep your smartphone or tablet charged yet, if placed in a location where there are lots of radio waves, it can generate up to 100 microwatts of power.
As Engadget noted, this could be useful for things like a smart smoke alarm that would never need to have its batteries changed, or a low-power security system that would not have to be plugged in to a wall outlet. Potentially, smart homes (or even smart cities) could take these RF waves to power sensors which would be self-sufficient and come with no monthly cost.
“It is the nature of broadcast transmissions that, when you broadcast, only some of the energy is received and used,” Lord Drayson explained to The Telegraph. “The energy that is not received goes to waste. What we’re doing is using that fact to power very small low-energy devices.”
“The radio frequency transmissions come from wireless networks, and as our hunger for information goes up, the amount of data that we want to transmit is going up exponentially, and therefore this is growing all the time,” he said, adding that the first commercial use of Freevolt is in the CleanSpace Tag, a sensor used to monitor carbon monoxide in the air.
—–
Feature Image: Freevolt
Comments