Disruptive: uBeam Lands $750K To Let You Charge Gadgets Without Plugs

Ubeam emits Ultrasound frequency waves from a base station. These sound waves are converted into mechanical energy by a crystal inside a flash-drive sized dongle attached to the device. The crystal resonates at that sound frequency and the mechanical energy of the vibration is then converted into electricity by the dongle.

The shit works. And everyone told her that it couldn't.

For example, ultrasound is already used to wirelessly charge pacemakers:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/wireless-pace...

And here is a very pertinent patent in this space (2004) that also contains a nice review of prior art:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=508SAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&...

The central difficulty in this idea, as pointed out in the above patent, is automatically aiming a sufficiently focused beam at the receiver. Otherwise you get killed by 1/rˆ2 power decay. And this is a non-trivial task, which will force them to either go the royalties way or dodge the existing patents.

I don't doubt the team can move forward, but I wonder if the undergrads (and their investors) have underestimated the difficulty and history of the problem.

That being said, it's refreshing to see folks inspired by real-world problems that don't involve "social".

Wishing them best of luck!

Maybe the Tesla patent expired or they have managed to patent the crystal radio!

"uBeam has “several patents” filed regarding its technology for wirelessly charging gadgets such as laptops and smartphones without plugging them into wall outlets or other energy sources, and she is being aided by a team of other people"

So they have applied for patents, not been awarded them. Though even if there are prior art/products that already do what they plan on doing they may still get awarded the patents for something that IMHO is in the public domain with the prior work by Tesla and cystal radio's. Not sure how they can expand upon that. But without a product to scrutinise, then there is nothing too see here.

Powermat has no plugs either. By the "closest thing to magic" comments, I would guess uBeam can charge your phone while still in your pocket (whereas powermat and similar systems require ~2mm distance from the charger).

Which, if true, is kind of scary -- it means that a bug or bad estimation would target nontrivial energy to your groin (5W charges your average modern phone; that might not sound like a lot, but cellphones are limited to 0.6W so that they don't raise your brain or skin temperature too much, and most phones in most locations use less than 0.1W when talking, about 0.01W on average in standby. 5W is a lot)

edit: pressed submit permaturely.

Demo.

It will be interesting to see how this goes. I'm certainly hoping that they can achieve something good.

However, as others have said, ultrasound for wireless charging must be horrifically inefficient. It will be interesting to learn more when they've got something working.

Not only are you contending with inverse square law (which can probably be negated to some extent by directing the beam of sound) but also losses due to air, losses in picking up the sound waves with a crystal and losses in converting that vibration into electrical energy.

If the efficiencies are much below 80%, it'd be a highly impractical method for charging any high power devices. Phones would probably be OK, but laptops with large batteries really wouldn't be.

At this point, we know nothing about the product, beyond the fact that it raised that much on potential.