Researchers Say They Can Charge a Phone With Ambient Sound

A new smartphone prototype can be charged by ambient sound, such as cheers from a football field or chatter from a coffee shop — though don't expect to cut your charging cable anytime soon.

Scientists from Queen Mary University of London and researchers at Nokia built a mobile device that can be refueled when everyday background noise, including traffic and music, is converted into electricity.

When Joe Briscoe and Steve Dunn of Queen Mary studied how playing fast-tempo pop and rock music stimulated and improved the performance of solar cells, the team wanted to create a device that could take motion energy and turn it into electricity.

"Charging by sound and vibrations could help improve the usability of electronic devices and allow them to work for longer, without worrying about connecting to a charger," Briscoe told Mashable on Thursday. "It would also be helpful to the environment — if we can use even a small amount of the waste energy (light, heat, sound, movement) in the environment, we can reduce the need for conventional electricity produced from fossil fuels."

The general concept of harvesting vibrational energy using piezoelectric materials has been around for about 20 years, Briscoe said, but the particular design of the prototype came out of his team's work on zinc oxide nanorods.

The energy harvester, or nanogenerator, works using the piezoelectric property of zinc oxide. When the zinc oxide nanorods are squashed, stretched or bent, they produce a voltage. The nanogenerator is designed to allow this voltage to be used to power a device — in this case, a mobile phone.

"I believe charging phones this way could be a part of the future, but there probably isn't enough energy in sound to remove the need for conventional charging completely," he said. "It could help to reduce how often we need to charge our phones, though."

While it's unclear if the technology will make its way to the smartphone industry, it's certainly a feature we could all use. Imagine the possibilities of just yelling at your phone to keep it powered.

Posted by : Gizmeon