Re: About wireless energy transfer

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: Ed Phillips <evp@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Original poster: westland <westland@xxxxxx>

Well, you may be right that Soljacic's work may 
not be all that original, but less because of 
what Tesla may have done then the fact that 
people are currently using the evanescent 
coupling effect in optical devices.  Soljacic has 
borrowed and adapted the math from optics and put 
it into the context of wireless energy 
transmission, showing how it competes with other 
transmission techniques, and where it might be 
appropriate.  It seems to me like OK work.
Indeed, Nicola Tesla may have investigated 
the  same phenomenon, but he didn't have all of 
the mathematical tools that are available today 
for modeling the effect  (e.g., modeling in terms 
of 'tunneling' which wouldn't have even been 
considered before the Schrödinger equation in the 
20's .... and I don't believe that Tesla was ever 
favorably inclined towards either relativity or 
quantum mechanics).   Without the math, evanscent 
coupling would never really get into modern 
consumer products, which is Soljacic's ultimate goal.

Chris"

      The only problem is that Soljacic's work 
doesn't involve evanescent modes at all and all 
of the principles he discusses have been known 
and used for nearly a century - Tesla's work 
wasn't even the first but his large-scale 
experiments were.  Soljacic wrote a paper but 
didn't contribute anything but obfuscation and 
his work won't advance the use of [inefficient] 
wireless energy transmission one little 
bit.  There is absolutely nothing in that paper 
of any use to a practical engineer which isn't 
already contained in familiar reference works and 
handbooks.  Where it's useful it's already in use!
   By the way, the use of REAL evanescent mode 
EM wave coupling for microwave devices goes back 
to the late 1930's so nothing new there.  I don't 
know about optics because that's not my field but 
suspect a study of Rayleigh's works of the late 
1800's might even turn up something on the subject.

Ed