Apple’s Wireless-Charging Patent Might Actually Free Us From Wires

Re:Apple’s Wireless-Charging Patent Might Actually Free Us F... by beambot on Monday December 03, 2012 @03:05AM (#4864435)

Resonant wireless power transfer has the (often undesirable) effect of de-tuning when you have multiple resonant loads in range. In short, the "resonant peak" dis-associates into two (or more) peaks, which ruins efficiency. Not to mention the effects of material composition (metal => bad).

To date, the only proposed approach to this problem is time division multiplexing (TDM) on each device and/or adaptive frequency tuning at the transmitter (which has regulatory issues). AFAIK, this is the same problem plaguing the other resonant wireless power transfer companies (eg. Witricity).

[I played around with a bit of this stuff during grad school. Specifically, I used non-resonant magnetic coupling to wirelessly power a swarm of robots: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2008/10/07/wirelessly-powering-sw... ]

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Re:Apple’s Wireless-Charging Patent Might Actually Free Us F... by kirillzubovsky on Monday December 03, 2012 @03:37AM (#4864520)

Wouldn't it be great though, if they could get it absolutely right? Bloggers had complained before that Lumia has wireless charging and iphone doesn't, but this article answers that problem very well - Apple isn't just trying to solve wired problem with a 20% improvement, they want a 200% improvement. I hoep they can get this right. Would sure be great to have all my i-devices charge as they sit here on the desk.

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Re:Apple’s Wireless-Charging Patent Might Actually Free Us F... by peteretep on Monday December 03, 2012 @04:29AM (#4864638)

I hope Apple don't get it right, because I'm really not sure I can handle hearing: "wah wah Apple didn't actually /invent/ wireless charging, you know" attached to every mention of the iCharge (circa 2015).

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Re:Apple’s Wireless-Charging Patent Might Actually Free Us F... by buster on Monday December 03, 2012 @05:14AM (#4864761)

And i hope Apple doesn't get it right because of the next patent wars about that stuff and because of all that media buzz again and again. Makes me sick.

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