Brief 4 - Blue

Here comes a little overview of thinkable alternative energy supplies. They are partially represented by some electronic consumer goods, else literature or pictured descriptions, as a collection of diverse energy harvesting techniques. The artefacts you might even want to use for some practical explorations and later prototyping.

The overview here provides idea-stage solutions to how to “win” energy on/at/from a device, such as the mobile phone, which range from harvesting energy from the sun or other radiation, heat, to movement, etc.

The first artefact is a wind-up and solar cell radio. Powering devices with the help of solar cells is long known for e.g. pocket calculators, but also ‘remote’ sensors like weather stations or parking meters and the like. For phones, the same has been proposed before the smartphone age as well as in more recent further developments of solar cells, see “Printed solar cells thinner than your hair could power your phone” https://phys.org/news/2017-06-solar-cells-thinner-hair-power.html or consider the pictured solar bag. Also the wind-up lever has been featured in the literature, see (Tischner & Hora, 2012, p. 431). Other kinetic energy (from movement) has been said to be harvestable from simply wearing the device, see ‘Smartphone future tech: Where can we possibly go from here?’ (Available: https://www.cnet.com/news/smartphone-future-tech-where-can-we-possibly-go-from-here/) and the pictured “wearable device that turns the body into a battery”. Last but not least, radio waves as a form of radiation different from the sun, have been considered as a source for power supply, see (Tischner & Hora, 2012, p. 434) The refugee radio.

The refugee radio designed by “Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Mareike Gast [is] a radio for emergency situations that harvests energy from the radio waves surrounding us (Fig. 19.8). The goal of this project was to distribute information in refugee camps. The solution is a radio that is based on the existing technology of the 'crystal radio' that runs on radio waves alone, not using any external energy. Two variations are available: the prefabricated radio and a do-it-yourself kit that can be assembled and designed by the users (Fig. 19.9).” (Tischner & Hora, 2012, p. 433)

Furthermore, how to “win-win” energy could be a question of integrating energy harvesting and the usual interactions with the device. For instance through typing on a touchscreen the interaction of typing itself could be paired with energizing the display by the touches, and either cumulate this dispersed energy or use it on the spot. Same applies for network connectivity of mobile phones. The data transmission radiation that the phone and telephony antennas send forth and back could maybe be used to also energize the mobile entity (the phone, at the receiving side) from the immobile network infrastructure (at the providing side). This would stand in great contrast to earlier recommendations of how to use less energy with a phone: An old Nokia “manual” would for example advice you to only make a call, where the network coverage is good as to avoid the phone spending some extra energy to get connected to the next antenna: _{“Conserve the Battery Power
First, try to make voice calls only from places where the signal strength is strong. This way, the radio doesn’t need to amplify its signal, and hence, you save energy. You can also set up the phone to make GPRS connections only “when needed” as opposed to “when available” to save the extra energy needed to maintain an always-on GPRS connection. You can change the GPRS connection setting via [...]”} [source: book "Nokia Smartphone Hacks" @ o’Reilly, some may remember having experienced]. Or, is it that we actually might become 'dependent of the wind', whether we can use mobile phones (see the pictured wind belt battery)?

Theoretically is providing energy a question of how dense it can be stored and how quickly transferred to the phone. We could certainly imagine ‘fuelled’ phones, that take breaks (e.g. drinking some fuel), a bit like refilling the water-powered clock. Breaks are then meant to recharge the phone quickly during operation, where it would be digesting the fuel parallel to the other processes during use. Let’s use ‘sugar’ or ‘honey’ as a placeholder for the fuel that enables the phone’s computational tasks, just as is the case with thinking/brainwork for humans. How would we be feeding this honey phone, you think?

Or, would you consider hydrogen (H2) and a small hydrogen cell a suitable fuel and battery/energy-provider with only water as by-product? Could the by-product water also serve as the fluid used to display visual content: sent to the right place in a display (e.g. a magnetic ink display, or water-activated electroluminescent (EL) print as pictured) the water would illuminate the corresponding pixels? The water would thus be in a closed loop system in the phone. Or would it in turn mean, we use electrical charging again to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen? Might the phone start breathing, breathing out oxygen when charging, else breathing in oxygen during use?

Substantial research is conducted to further raise energy storage density, a.o. do some scholars see (the highly doubtful) ‘cold fusion’ as a possible solution (yet rather theoretically, and not in the near future). In principle this thinking asserts a disruptive breakthrough within energy storage density is possible, which means that batteries literally would shrink to the size of a needle-head, i.e. factor 10³ smaller. The general audience might be left with some food for thought or reflection here: Would this not cause a huge rebound effect spanning all human activity? If energy was that omnipresent, would not more, if not all of it, be spent on so far utopian activities? Activities like thought-reading-style communication (telepathy), real-time experiences supported by deep-learning/AI, almost “beaming” everything around that needs to travel in space (telekinesis) because it can be dismantled into the information/data and energy for to resurrect elsewhere?