College student invents device capable of charging batteries with radio waves, wifi signals

Monday, April 08, 2013 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: radio waves, batteries, charging device

(NaturalNews) Building upon a concept originally hatched by the famous Serbian inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla, a German university student has come up with a novel way to harvest stray radio waves and wifi signals and turn them into usable energy. As reported by Activist Post, Dennis Siegel's prototypical device is already capable of charging a small battery in as little as one day, and has the potential to power a whole lot more, a whole lot faster, with the right modifications.

The second-place winner in a technology competition at the University of the Arts Bremen, Hochschulpreis in Germany, Siegel's device takes advantage of the various stray electromagnetic fields that constantly surround us. Radio waves, mobile phone signals, wireless router frequencies, and even stray energy emitted from overhead power lines can all be harvested by the device and reused as battery power in the many electrical devices we all rely on today.

"We are surrounded by electromagnetic fields which we are producing for information transfer or as a byproduct," explains Siegel on his blog about the device. "Many of those fields are very capacitive and can be harvested with coils and high frequency diodes. Accordingly, I built special harvesting devices that are able to tap into several electromagnetic fields to exploit them."

Siegel's device is small, about the size of mobile phone, and is equipped with a simple light-emitting diode (LED) indicator that detects the presence of usable energy waves. And there are currently two types of harvester available, one that picks up lower frequencies below 100 Hz, which can be obtained from general mains, and another that pick frequencies both lower and higher frequencies, including those originating from radio broadcasts, mobile phones, Bluetooth devices, and WLAN.

"Depending on the strength of the electromagnetic field it is possible to charge a small battery within one day," adds Siegel. "The system is meant to be an option for granting access to already existing but unheeded energy sources. By exploring these sources it can create a new awareness of the invisible electromagnetic spaces while giving them a spatial dimension."

As some readers will recall, Nikola Tesla's work with high-tension induction coils and wireless energy transmission via electrostatic induction back in the late 1800s basically laid the initial groundwork for Siegel's recent discovery. It has been known by some for more than a century, in other words, that energy can be transmitted wirelessly, or in this case captured and utilized without wires.

You can learn more about Tesla's amazing work by visiting: http://www.teslasociety.com/

Sources for this article include:

http://www.activistpost.com