Sony develops energy harvesting module from electromagnetic wave noise

Re:Sony develops energy harvesting module from electromagnet... by simonbarker87 on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @12:12PM (#37483480)

This was basically my feeling when doing my PhD - there is energy everywhere and if we make systems power efficient enough there is no real reason we can’t make significantly great use of that energy.

That being said, it’s not the energy per se that we can tap into, it’s the gradient created as it dissipates/moves that we tap into. Heat is great, but not if it’s uniform, solar is great, but not if it harvesting it casts an area in shadow that needs it, vibration is great so long as it doesn’t damp and further load the system it’s being taken from.

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Re:Sony develops energy harvesting module from electromagnet... by helpfulContrib on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @12:36PM (#37483871)

Had me at gradient, lost me at heat, got me back at harvesting and shadows, and now things are going just great at the damp point.

I believe we are going to find these systems in our future, soon enough.

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Re:Sony develops energy harvesting module from electromagnet... by rpaddock on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @01:55PM (#37484951)

" doesn’t damp and further load the system it’s being taken from."

Don't all of these Harvesting systems load a system? For example one of the transmitters somewhere. Yes it is microwatts and no transmitter will notice a single unit. However if we start to talk large quantity of sensors, who is really paying the price? Otherwise we are admitting that Free Energy is a real thing.

You and others may find the recently released Nexperia NBM5100 and NBM7100 of interest. While aimed at batteries it functionally translates high impedance power sources to lower impedance to charge up caps for IoT usage.

https://www.nexperia.com/products/analog-logic-ics/power-ics...

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Re:Sony develops energy harvesting module from electromagnet... by themoonisachees on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @02:40PM (#37485689)

I mean yeah obviously thermodynamics aren't being violated, I think the base idea is that the background noise you're harvesting from was going to be lost as inverse square law losses anyway. Large amounts of sensors would ultimately be as a whole coupled to antennae broadcasting on those frequencies, damping them, and causing the gain circuits to automatically increase output power.

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Re:Sony develops energy harvesting module from electromagnet... by samus on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @02:35PM (#37485563)

It would need a lot of these devices for the odd mW to really make a difference. It adds up, but it's in the ballpark of a router's status LEDs. These costs are already accounted for as part of the device's operation. Critical systems might start to better direct their transmissions and to reduce side bands instead of saturating the area with energy.

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Re:Sony develops energy harvesting module from electromagnet... by simonbarker87 on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @02:04PM (#37485042)

Oh for sure, it’s relative to the system being harvested from and the amount of energy being extracted though.

If it’s a train cart/carriage then not really a problem as there is so much mass and vibration to go around, if it’s the surface of a small industrial machine that needs to be reasonably balanced only producing a few hundred milli g then more of a concern.

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Re:Sony develops energy harvesting module from electromagnet... by amelius on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @02:30PM (#37485423)

Well it may push for better EMI compliance.

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Re:Sony develops energy harvesting module from electromagnet... by berniedurfee on Wednesday September 13, 2023 @08:38PM (#37503462)

That’s what I was thinking.

Wouldn’t harvesting the stray noise lower the impedance of the thing being noisy, making it use more power to compensate?

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