MIT’s Andre Kurs, Aristeidis Karalis, Robert Moffatt, Peter Fisher, and John Joannopoulos, and team leader Marin Soljacic have developed “WiTricity” (pronounced like WhyTricity, not WiiTricitity) using magnetically coupled resonance to induce an electric current from one device to another.
It worries me that they tested this on a 60W bulb, why didn’t they use a low-energy fluorescent bulb or an LED light array? Never mind. The next thing they need to do is couple this to the Steorn power supply and we will have the power outlet of the future.
I thought that Nikola Tesla had already done something like this?
He did something _like_ this, but not the same. The new technology exploits resonance and so is to lasers what Tesla’s approach is to the filament lightbulb.
It is similar to magnetic induction used in transformers and Splashpower’s approach, only
with the big difference that it is employs resonances to enhance the achieved energy transfer. The efficiency is ~Q2 times larger for a resonant
rather than a non-resonant induction mechanism, so if one designs the system to have a large Q (~1000 in our case), you can see how significant an
improvement one can achieve.