Nokia Targets Mobile Kinetic Energy Charging

justice4all writes "Nokia has filed a US patent for a phone charger that harvests kinetic energy. The technology has been used in laptops, PDAs, and GPS receivers, according to Nokia. Essentially, the mobile devices would be powered in part through the movements of their owners."

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Re:Perpetual motion

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not plug a hydraulic pump that generates power to your heart/arteries that way you have mobile power until you die, you won't be needing the device after that anyways...

So the phone case has to go on a place that moves?

[Fastfwd]

I mean would you get a better charge by carrying the phone in your hand than on your belt because it moves more? Maybe even on your shoes but then picking up a call is not much fun.

Re:Prior art

[Sarten-X]

As mentioned a few comments up, a key element is to have the mass of the battery itself used in the charging system. I don't know about watches, but from the move-to-charge devices I've seen, they all have an additional moving mass. Using the battery itself to charge would reduce the overall weight significantly. That seems to be the novel idea here.

Re:Prior art

[Duradin]

Watches have minuscule power consumption compared to a phone and can get along with using capacitors instead of batteries so there is less loss during charging.

Getting a kinetic charger to kick out the power necessary to charge a lithium battery would be very impressive.

Conference Notes:

[KiwiCanuck]

I was at a conference in Europe a few years ago and they had an afternoon section devoted to power scavenging. Most devices produced nanowatts of power. The problem is extracting the power from random motion. A fixed length cantilever (the simplest design) will only produce meaningful power when at resonance. Complex arrays can extract more power, but the cost-benefit ratio rises quickly. The only device that broke the milliwatt was NASA's micro (milli?) jet turbine (it might have broke the Watt barrier as well, I can't remember exactly). However, the turbine was made out of a stack of twenty 3-inch wafers. At $10 per wafer (very cheap wafer), you're starting cost is $200. So it is very costly to build, but could be extremely useful in many applications.