If you’re sick of your phone’s battery dying when you need it most, there might be
good news around the corner.
Scientists are working on a weird new way to make your battery last longer.
Hey guys, Amy here on DNews, and if you’re anything like me you use your phone for a
lot more than calling, things like emailing, texting, posting to social media, and even
streaming videos.
In all these phone-based activities, that communication is made possible because our
phones connect to cell towers or Wi-Fi routers, and those are both energy-intensive processes
that drain our batteries.
Cell phones broadcast radio signals in all directions at once, which gives the fastest
route to a nearby cell tower or router.
But not all the radio waves reach a destination.
Robert Lee, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State University,
estimates that as much as 97 percent of cell phone signals never get anywhere, they just
leave your phone and disappear into the ether.
A team from Ohio State is on the case, working on a way to recapture some of that lost energy
and redirect it back into the phone’s battery, not to recharge it but to slow the speed at
which the battery drains.
The idea of converting radio signals into battery power may seem kinda out there but
it’s actually not.
Radio waves are really just a very high-frequency form of alternating current or AC., just like
what a power grid supplies.
But most devices need direct current or DC to operate.
So for more than a century, electronics manufacturers have installed an electrical circuit called
a rectifier to convert AC to DC.
What the research team is hoping to do is develop circuitry that could convert some
of the lost radio signals into direct current power that would be directed back into the
phone’s battery, recycling some of the lost power.
The team from Ohio State has come up with a system to identify which radio signals are
being wasted and which can be harvested without compromising the phone’s function, which
is good because this system will be a balancing act.
The trick is to siphon off just enough of the radio signal to slow battery drainage
and extend its life without degrading the quality of voice calls or data transmission.
And though this will only work when the phone is transmitting, i.e. when you’re using
data rather than playing music or games offline, those transmitting functions are the energy-gobbling
ones.
And it should be said that this is a very different way of extending your phone’s
life on a charge than simply coming up with faster or more creative ways of charging your
phone like with solar panels or even harnessing your body heat into energy, which are both
systems research teams around the world are investigating to extend the lives of our smart
phones.
The Ohio State team will likely develop their system into a physical add-on to a phone before
hopefully working with manufacturers to incorporate the circuitry directly into the device.
So what would you guys do with a longer battery life?
Let us know in the comments below!
You can find DNews on Twitter, and I’m on there as @astVitnageSpace.
And of course, for more DNews every single day of the week, don’t forget to subscribe!