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Focused Microwaves Could Enable Wireless Power Transfer
esocid alerts us to news out of the University of Michigan, where physics researchers have found a way to focus microwaves to a point 20 times smaller than their wavelength using a new 'superlens'. Such resolution was thought to be impossible until recent years, and it could bring about the capability to transfer power wirelessly.
"No matter how powerful a conventional lens, it cannot focus light down to more than about half its wavelength, the 'diffraction limit'. This limits the amount of data that can be stored on a CD, and the size of features on computer chips. The new lens is a 127-micrometer-thick plate of teflon and ceramic with a copper topping. 'The beauty of these is that they're planar,' Grbic says, 'they're easy to fabricate.' The lenses can be made through a single step of photolithography, the process used to etch computer chips."
Back in the 1960's. Diode grid to rectify the beamed power. Bad idea.
What is it with geeks and magnifying glasses?
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
While it's nifty that they can focus EM radiation to a smaller point now, I'm not following how this will enable wireless power transfer.
What I remember from studying this technology 15 years ago was that it was possible to create a beam sharper than the diffraction limit, but the result was diffuse spill-over. That is, one could create an extremely sharp main lobe in the beam pattern, but one had to suffer higher side-lobes. That's OK for imaging and lithography applications -- the spill-over is diffuse enough not to cause too many problems. But for power applications it means both inefficiency (power lost to the side lobes) and irradiation for people who think they aren't in the beam.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
If the limits on a CD are because of conventional lenses, and this can get 10 times the best a lens can do, it follows that a superlens-based CD, DVD or Blu-Ray system could get 10 times the capacity per track and 10 times as many tracks (in other words, 100 times the capacity). That would be some serious storage space.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Cue jokes about batteries in 3...2...1...
but where will I put the meter? J.P.M.
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Current proposed methods for space-based power transmission mean you need a several mile wide area to collect the energy. OTOH, it would be fairly safe. Like a day at the beach. You might get a sunburn but not much else unless you lived right in the path of the beam. And any hard surface, glass, or sunblock would negate almost all of it. But you need a really large area.
The downside of this, obviously, is that if the beam is made twenty times smaller, you would only need a half mile array of collectors, but anything caught underneath it would be fried in a few minutes. (do the math - 20x smaller is several orders of magnitude more powerful - like using a magnifying glass pointed at the sun at half an inch diameter versus a small dot)
Let's hope the aim never gets off.
Firstly, it's horribly inefficient. There are significant losses over the signal path that hand waving won't make go away. And then there's the real show-stopper: high power microwave beams would be a hazard to aviation, shipping, or anything or anyone else who got in the way.
There'd be enough scattering of the beam to spread the danger around. Sure, this technology is possible - but there just don't seem to be any practical applications for it. Wire is much more efficient and airmen have a chance to see and avoid it. They'd never know that microwave beam was there until they entered it.
Beaming power in from space is a perennial favorite - but nobody ever seems to be able to get around the atmospheric effects. And I'd prefer to not have any randomly scattered ionizing radiation impinging on my home, thanks.
Back in the 1960's. Diode grid to rectify the beamed power. Bad idea.
Actually it was a very GOOD idea. But NASA blew it.
The plan was to site solar power satellites in geosync orbit and bring the power back via microwaves.
Unlike microwave ovens (which are tuned to a frequency that is strongly absorbed by water), these would be tuned to a frequency where water - clouds, rain, birds, cows, people - is essentially transparent. This is good both for getting the power through the atmosphere and avoiding rains of roast duck.
I could go into detail on why there's no problem from the millimeter waves, but that would take time. Short form: System failures defocus the beam so much it becomes just radio interference in directional antennas pointed at the satellites. Even when fully focussed it's not an issue for tissue: You can grow crops and graze cattle under the (rather spindly) rectennas, so they don't even use up the chunk of land they're on.
Benefits:
- Enough power to completely replace fossil fuel AND nuclear plants and absorb forseeable energy use expansion for decades.
- 'Way cheaper, too. (Even at '60s fuel prices.)
- Essentially no pollution at ground level.
- Bootstraps a space program that can then move other manufacturing processes, and THEIR pollution, off the planet as well.
NASA blew it by doing a study that purported to show it would be too expensive. But they did that by splitting the design teams for the rockets and the power plant. The power plant designers made a turbine very large to get a couple extra percent of efficiency. Then the rocket designers came up with a heavy lifter sized to take the biggest piece. Result: Enormous rockets with few trips to ammortize the design/construction costs, rather than moderate sized ones with many trips. Cost skyrockets versus a properly integrated design with a small turbine and a fleet of smaller lifters.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I mean those microwave power plants have misfires all the time. Can we really afford to lose that arcology? It cost a ton.
Hell is other people - Jean-Paul Sartre
I've often bitched about the over use of the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag, but if ever there was a time for it, this is it.
The ability to focus light is currently a limiting factor for reducing the feature size on VLSI chips below 0.45nm. Has this lens been discussed for this use? Thank you in advance for any pointers to write-ups or other information.
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
just network the computers that control it!
Are you serious? You're smarter than a Nasa study?
I'm going to assume you are.
Then you can certainly explain how 1300 watts per square meter and putting it...IN FUCKING OUTERSPACE...is better than 1000 watts per m^2 on the ground.
Sounds fun doesn't it! Just like hyperdrive sounds fun on star trek, and I wish I had the force, but in reality it doesn't make a lot of sense.
And a Miss fire can start a fire taking the power plant with it. Pay for the for safer fusion power plant.
Much of the limitation on the speed and size of the newer generation of chips is related to the wavelength of light in the lithography process. The race is to use shorter and shorter wavelengths to make smaller and smaller transistors. If you can put this energy into a space 20 times smaller than the wavelength, then Moore's law lives on. Wow, think of the next generation of lithography and chip manufacturing. Anybody converted the tech from microwave to short wavelength light yet? If not, get busy. There is a patent for the first to demonstrate it in lithography.
The truth shall set you free!
I don't know if he's correct, but even a small amount of thought should show you a lot of possible ways.
* No exposure to the elements, thus reduced maintenance cost from wind/weeds/corrosion
* No land cost
* No clouds, no day/night cycle
* Cost is based on weight, not on land, potentially allowing for use of extremely large light cheap panels instead of smaller denser more expensive ones
Does it make up for the difference? I couldn't say. But there's four ways in which space beats land in terms of efficiency.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Okay I claim prior art on "Wireless Wire";
Been banging on about it for years;
But it's Heinlen who really gets the award;
Waldo and Magic inc.;
Me? I've got a problem with Dark Matter.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
Actually, NASA's study got it exactly right. The amount of solar-collecting material you'd need to place into orbit is large enough that you'd spend a lot more energy and money getting it into orbit then you'd ever get back from it once it was functional. Things may have improved since then (more efficient rockets, lighter solar panels, etc), but I doubt they've improved so much as to make the plane feasible yet. I'd re-do the feasibility studies after the space elevator is up and working, getting enough mass into orbit will be a lot cheaper then
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I'm reminded of the Star Trek episode where they power the M5 supercomputer with a high-intensity wireless power transfer beam at roughly shin level.
It was called the Broadcast Energy Transmitter or B.E.T. COBRA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA!
airmen have a chance to see and avoid it
This is not a problem. Pilots already have many many hazards they can't see already. These are marked on the charts as no-go zones.
In reality, most flights are done essentially 'blind' using IFR flight rules that require zero visibility. So this issue is a non-problem.
I think space is much less habitable for delicate solar array than this cushy, climate-controlled rock with plenty of surface to spare.
Why not put solar arrays on the poles? Maintenance in the offseason.
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Why do I keep having visions of tesla dancing through my head?
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
I have no problem with this idea. It is intriguing. My problem is with the energy system of America as a whole. The fossil fuel market is drawing quickly to a close. Now many people want to replace their gas with hydrogen. I completely disagree with hydrogen for three reasons. First hydrogen is more volatile than gasoline and it has serious storage problems (Ask the Hindenburg). Secondly, electricity is wasted in the electrolysis process (electrolysis is around 66% efficient). Lastly and most importantly it is exactly what oil companies want. They want an infrastructure they can control. A battery/ electric car is in my view undeniably the best option. Don't let any corporations catch you saying that though. I think renewable energy is a great idea in the short run. But growing energy needs will ultimately eclipse renewable energy. Or at least there will be some minimum that energy will always cost more than In 2005 a nuclear reactor in Arizona produced more energy than all solar and wind plants that year. About 10% of American power in nuclear power. In the United States for the past 30 year since Three Mile Island there has been a public schizophrenia of nuclear power. Only one new reactor has been approved since 1979. France is the world's leading energy exporter and about 75% of their energy is nuclear energy. They have employed new technology that reduces nuclear waste by 90%. Really nuclear waste is benign. The amount of toxic waste created by producing solar cells for renewable energy eclipses the amount of nuclear waste generated. As for nuclear meltdowns, the temperature of a uranium powered critical reactor regardless of design will never eclipse a certain temperature. The casings of the reactor can withstand this temperature. Persons living next door to a reactor encounter less radiation from the reactor each year than they do from continental plane flight. Contrary to popular belief nuclear power is both safe and economical. Ultimately nuclear power is the key especially when considering space travel within the solar system. If you are familiar with antimatter, it is not an available resource, but can be created. Eventually in many years antimatter will be the only viable option for interstellar travels. Space travel is something that would stimulate the economy. Every dollar spent by NASA makes seven times its value in GDP. There are trillions of dollars of natural resources on a single asteroid. The moon contains Tritium that is almost a purely burning nuclear fuel. So space is worth the effort. This is off topic. But replacing nuclear power I don't think is wise. I do believe that this satellite solar beam technology is worth pursuing.
Down with nukes! Nuclear Free Zone!
So wait a second... instead of needing a dish that's 1km in diameter, we'll need a dish that's just 1.5cm in diameter?
yeah I know the SC2k jokes are old. I tried.
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I've had wireless wireless extension cords for YEARS. I can't believe you guys think this is new, here's the site i got mine from. BTW they work great! Wireless extension cords
Wind. Daily drastic temperature shifts. I don't know if the poles snow at all, but if they do, you'll have to rig up a system to clear the snow off. Wipers have moving parts which tend to jam and break, heating coils would massively exacerbate the temperature-shift problem. Getting the power to someplace useful - are you going to run a giant cable to Canada? If so, what kind of maintenance is it going to need? Or are you going to bounce the power off a satellite, doubling transmission losses compared to the satellite-based systems and requiring a satellite launch anyway?
Space has its own set of problems, of course. Radiation, magnetic fields, and if you go into darkness at all, an entire new set of temperature-shift issues. But there's far less atmosphere, and therefore heating the entire spacecraft during "night" to eliminate temperature shift problems is much more feasible. (I don't know if it [i]is[/i] feasible, note. It's just less ridiculous.)
I'm not saying that either of these is better, again. I'm just saying that they involve different sets of challenges, and that without quite a lot of knowledge of the problem (which I certainly don't have) it's hard to say which is actually worse.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Two words: Space junk.
:-)
We'll be up there replacing solar panels regularly, guaranteed, because of space junk.
Geosynchronous satellites don't move out of the way of space junk so well, being well, relatively stationary (relatively)
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Three points. :)
First off, geosynchronous may or may not be a good idea. Geosynchronous orbit is painfully expensive, and in most cases it's far more cost-effective to launch a large number of low-orbit satellites. If receiver stations were placed in various locations, satellites could just lock on to a different receiver as they pass over the globe. (On top of this, it means that a lot of different countries could theoretically buy energy at various times from this - it might even be worth placing receiver stations in third-world countries, since it's not like the power would be doing anything useful if it wasn't getting sold.)
Second, space is really really big. Even with the space junk we have up there already, impacts are spectacularly rare. It's a factor, but it's not a huge factor.
Third, why fix the broken panels? I highly suspect it would turn out to be cheaper to simply launch more satellites, at least until we have some kind of orbital repair bots. As long as the core electronics are reasonably redundant, the thing can stay up there as long as it's got a single working panel.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Are you serious? You're smarter than a Nasa study?
I don't claim to be (though I did work on NASA projects and have some idea where I stand among the mind power of the rocket science community B-) ).
But I'm not talking from my own work. I'm summarizing what I heard from some of the braniacs who were paying attention to the problem.
Then you can certainly explain how 1300 watts per square meter and putting it...IN FUCKING OUTERSPACE...is better than 1000 watts per m^2 on the ground.
Well for starters:
- No clouds, rain, or snow.
- No atmospheric attenuation.
- No night.
- No seasons. ("It's always noon on midsummer's day.")
Those are good for about a factor of seven (depending on the earthbound site you're comparing).
More importantly:
- No gravity (except tides).
- No wind (except solar wind).
- No oxidizing atmosphere.
- No corroding water and waterborne ions.
This enormously reduces the structures required.
That would be an enormous reduction in the amount of material needed to make and mount solar panels. Most of their structure is to protect them from the elements and support them against gravity and wind.
But we're not talking photovoltaic solar panels here. We're talking a steam plant, with the steam generated in pipes and mirrors and condensed by pipes with black cooling fins in the mirrors' shade.
With no gravity, wind, and the like, building square miles of parabolic-cylinder solar mirrors is trivial. Making them of aluminized mylar "spaceblanket" material supported by glued-together toothpicks and cobwebs would be a massive overdesign. Virtually all of your mass is the boiler and condenser pipes and the wisp of structure that keeps them straight and properly arranged and oriented as they heat and cool unevenly.
Now it might prove even better to build some film solar panels - especially if you're doing it in space by vacuum deposition of films on some flimsy substrate with an unlimited supply of hard vacuum for free. But sending up bundles of pipe, rolls of wispy plastic, and a flimsy support structure to expand in space. wrap with the mirror film, and aluminize once it's in place is a well understood and (as space stuff goes) inexpensive process.
The power plant is a moderately small lump of machinery suitable for assembling in orbit and charging with a small amount of water.
The transmitter array gets deployed much like the mirrors - but more simply. (It doesn't have to be accurately, or even consistently, spaced. The transmitters are synchronized and the array is focussed by a pilot beam from the ground site, computing the complex-conjugate of the incoming carrier's waveform to focus the beam on the antenna surrounding the pilot transmitter. Lose the pilot and they go incoherent - spreading the energy about equally through the surrounding sky, of which the entire facing side of Earth is a small fraction. (And you can modulate the pilot with an encrypted spectrum-spreader so nobody can steal the power or redirect it to another target.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... replacing our entire energy consumption with external sources only increases the energy flux striking the Earth by about 0.01%.
Actually, replacing ground-generated electricity with space solar power REDUCES the heat load.
First: Ground generated electricity is made with big heat engines, limited by the carnot cycle. In addition to the heat released by using the energy, there's the heat released on the cold side of the heat engine. The total is a lot more than you bought and used.
But with space solar power the cold side of the heat engine is in space, radiating toward the sky (with it's black body temperature of 4 degrees absolute). The dumped heat misses the earth. All you heat with is the useful power and a few percent losses. (The sky-to-ground system is estimated to run in the range of 90% efficient and only part of its losses are on the ground.
But far more significant: Fuel-driven ground generators release carbon dioxide, which continuously traps solar power as heat until it's eventually scrubbed from the atmosphere decades or centuries later. That is a big multiple of the useful power actually delivered. No fuel burned on Earth, no CO2 pumping the greenhouse.
The main problem will be keeping us from sliding into an ice age over the next 400 to 1,200 years. (According to one model the current interglacial peaked at about the dawn of agriculture and we've been essentially regulating the earth's temperature as the "furnace" output has been curving down for the last 6,000 years or so, with a slight bump since industrialization. Stop the CO2 and we'd quickly crash back onto the steepening slope of the cooling curve.) But that takes decades to centuries. So we can decide what to do about it in a few generations, when we start to get below the old "regulated" temperature.
One nice thing: If we need to bring in more heat from space we'll have the infrastructure to do it. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Here is their other paper (no registration required) on the design of these near-field focusing plates. The results are quite impressive indeed; there are no sidelobes or spillover to speak of. The concept to understand here is that the final radiation pattern is designed (it's the starting point, in the math), and the required focusing plate geometry is the result of solving the equations in the paper.
"No matter how powerful a conventional lens, it cannot focus light down to more than about half its wavelength, the 'diffraction limit'. This limits the amount of data that can be stored on a CD, and the size of features on computer chips."
Wrong. Modern processors are typically produced on a fab that uses 193 nanometer wavelength extreme ultraviolet light, yet cutting edge chips are using 45 nm feature sizes, about 1/4 the wavelength. According to the article this should be impossible.
The way it's done is with masks that compensate for the diffraction pattern, using techniques such as optical proximity correction and phase shift masking. The techniques have limitations, and this results in large numbers of design rules that have to be satisfied to have the process work.
So, why don't they use a smaller wavelength? The answer is because lenses no longer work as you start getting into the X-ray region.
I suspect that these people have inadvertently re-invented a form of phase shift masking. Too bad for them that it's already heavily patented.
Liquid Karma
This tech will most likely be developed? Why? I mean there are 100s of other energy ideas blowing around out there.. Why would this one come to be the first significant major power source since nuclear power?
Please Google "North American Energy Policy" sometime.
You know, the part where they reduced something to "20 times smaller" than it was... a 2000% reduction in size of *anything* is bigger news than wireless power transfer, if you ask me! Let's see... 100mm - (2000% * 100mm) = -1900mm? The possibilities are limitless! Or did they mean 1/20 the width...
Suse vivo vixi victum reduco is ea id creatura absit decessus a facultas Linux! Dev root, dev root!
Sure would be great. DVDs that hold 80 Gig. No power lines clogging up the scenery. Only a 50% rise in cases of noggin cancer. Oh, and we might, if we have spare some time, be able to finish that Star Wars thing of Reagan's. Or was Real Genius where I saw something like that.
So if the energy efficiency of the panel/beam is greater than about 100%-37%-5% = 58%, then this system will result in more heat than would normally occur from the sunlight.
Of course, even if it does significantly increase the amount of heat generated for the fraction of sunlight that it captures, that is still a tiny fraction of the sky that is covered, and the net result will be completely negligible compared to just about anything else.
Finally a way to get rid of the pidgeon problem and power your home at the same time. It could also go a long way to feeding the homeless, all the cooked birds. I see this as a win, win, win.
Don't forget military vulnerability. If your entire power supply is based on things that are really far away in space, you'll have a hell of a time protecting them from sabotage or outright war. In fact, in case of war, you'll need to have some kind of back-up power source that you can use to power your country for at least a few years, until you either lose and get taken over (in which case it's now someone else's problem) or the war ends peacefully and you can shoot another transmitter into space.
In that case, you have to decide which kind of terrestrial power to choose: coal, oil, solar, gas, wind, nuclear--all of which have their drawbacks. So, to an extent, you're back at square one.
Belden http://www.belden.com/ is selling wire.
...if the receiver dish is on the moon. This strikes me as a really good way to get a big power supply on the moon without having to land lots of heavy crap (eg, nuclear reactor components or acres of solar panels) on it, which is (still) difficult and expensive.
The Deathstar was actually just a focused microwave power transmiter. Apparetly there was a tuning error, they went from 'unfocused' passed 'power transmission' to 'extra crispy'.
* No land cost
Not really a factor. Land is dirt cheap compared to the cost of launching things into space. Gigantic thin film low cost solar arrays are already being deployed in Germany.
Logically, I just don't understand how conventional land based concentrated solar (that is, solar energy focused into extremely hot sands which can then be used to generate electricity as base load) would be more expensive than launching systems into space and dealing with transmission losses to the collection point. Let alone nuclear energy, where most of the issues have been addressed, but environmentalists are still stuck in the 1970s.
If it can focus so fine we can use it to etch chips?
It's a factor because of transmission costs and because of the availability of good land for this. Good land for solar panels tends to be good land for other things as well, unless it's off in the middle of nowhere, in which case you get the giant-cable-maintenance problem again. Trying to build a solar farm next to the Bay Area, for example, would be pretty impractical, while two or three receiving stations would be a lot cheaper.
:)
My position is still that I, and most of the people in this thread, don't actually know enough to determine whether space solar makes sense
(I do agree that nuclear is hilariously underused though. Get these damn rabid Greenpeace members out of my energy generation, dammit)
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
alas, the tumor ray is here.
Roasted birds fall from the heavens right into your mouth...
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The French reduce their nuclear waste by dumping it in the Channel. Very safe that.
Wow I can't believe this is currently +4, Insightful.
Watts are watts. It's all going to be heat in the long run (once the energy is used). You can't get around that, it's thermodynamics. Fretting about "energy absorbed by the atmosphere" and other such losses is only relevant to efficiency of the mechanism as an electricity source.
The REAL reason GP shouldn't be concerned is that these were watts that we were going to receive ANYWAY. These were solar rays destined for the Earth to begin with, and those that weren't only make up a TINY percentage of the Earth's solar flux.
But aside from the first sentence of your post, everything you've said is either inaccurate or irrelevant.
The name of Nikola Tesla has been mentioned a few times already in this thread.
I just want to say: if you don't know or barely know something about this man, I really really recommend reading about him.
He's one of the greatest geniuses of the last few centuries. Called "The Father Of Physics" and "the man who invented the twentieth century".
Especially the latter is NO understatement. His list of inventions is huge and the combination of genius and being a workaholic (sleeping 3 hours per day) resulted in something over 700 patents on his name. He can even be related to over 1200 patents!
Although he is sadly barely mentioned in schoolbooks, he is the inventor of things like:
- The Inductor/AC motor
- The Tesla Coil
- The radio (a court ruled he was first, not Marconi!)
- The AND logical gate
- Wireless transfer of electricity
- Tesla turbines (bladeless turbines)
- X-ray tubes
- Robotics
- Fluorescent lamps
- VTOL aircraft!
- Polyphase systems
- Remote control; he had a remote controlled boat in 1898!
This list is NOT COMPLETE
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla
And the really big bang is that it's very very likely that he managed to extract free energy from the vacuum/atmosphere.
Together with two other people, he has been riding a car for a week long... a silent car which had just an antenna system... reaching speeds in the order of 90 miles per hour.
He really was one of the most extraordinary persons to ever walk on this planet.
Sadly the problem was that, despite his genius, he was not a great business man. Money was always a problem and basically everyone (Edison, JP Morgan, etc.) tried to make money of this man who was so hard to make this a better world.
Now why is this man barely recognized for his achievements?
And why does he not have AT LEAST one Nobel Prize?!?
Interesting interview:
The Tesla Conspiracy: Mark DeMucha Part 1 of 11
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzxvhA72vGI
I dreamed about it when I was like 7(17 years ago). So nice to see that someone with education in physics is actually considering it :)
(And fortunately enough I have rather stupid parents that I believed when they said to stop dreaming about nonsense.)
And now I am a developer. What a shame....
Faraday cages block EM waves by having holes that are smaller than the wavelength of the wave. (This is why your microwave can have little holes that allow you to see in, but keep the radiation from leaking out.) By packing waves into an even smaller space, they would be able to pass straight through a Faraday cage.
The deal-killer for space-based power generation via Hertzian cables is the difficulty of putting it in geosynchronous orbit. Consider how long and how many flights it's taken to assemble the ISS. That's for low earth orbit, where the space shuttle and Souyuz can reach it. Getting a series of power generation satellites to the Clarke belt would make that task look simple.
The only sane way of building such a system would be to construct it in space. This would mean collecting asteroids in near-Earth orbits, mining them for materials and constructing the panels from orbital factories. Assuming enough raw materials could be found (quite a big 'if'), the process could become self-sustaining, but the start-up costs would be huge.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
To a degree. Building a supply of say oil is quite possible, the problem is that we're running out. If we stopped using oil and started using all space power, we'd have plenty oil that could be stored in case of emergency. But we can't do that, if we use up all the oil and THEN try to use space power.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Do not look at satellite with remaining eye.
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
- Enough power to completely replace fossil fuel AND nuclear plants and absorb forseeable energy use expansion for decades.
- 'Way cheaper, too. (Even at '60s fuel prices.)
- Essentially no pollution at ground level.
- Bootstraps a space program that can then move other manufacturing processes, and THEIR pollution, off the planet as well.
I'd like to add another:
- Completely change the balance of power in the middle east by dropping a significant fraction of daily demand for oil.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Who is to say the frequencies are transparent? When your talking about frequency you are talking about the size of the wave. Physics tell us that waves have three properties, they travel forever in a straight line, they bounce off an object larger than themselves, or they are absorbed.
So if your microwave beam (which ain't going to all go in one perfect direction) is the size of ping pong balls or bb's that's going to get absorbed by the human body. A ping pong ball will be absorbed by the eye socket, and a bb can fit through your ear.
Good Luck with this torture based technology.
" * No exposure to the elements . . . "
Just exposure to highly corrosive elemental oxygen, high speed solar wind particles, gammas ray, x-rays, high energy ultraviolet, and the like.
" * No land cost"
Just exorbitant costs per pound to reach orbit"
" * Cost is based on weight, not on land . . . "
except for the land-based receivers.
most of the stuff edison 'invented', actually was stolen from tesla. you even do not know he invented and promoted alternative current to carry electricity along long power lines, where edison was foolishly insisting on direct current.
please, pal, this is slashdot, get real. go study some science history.
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They have practical realizations of negative refraction lenses nowadays, those are what makes the difference.
* No land cost
* No clouds, no day/night cycle * There is no exposure to the elements but what about space debris? A solar array in space is likely to be quite large, all that surface area will increase its risk of being hit by something.
* No land cost but it will take up a fair amount of room in an increasingly occupied orbital real estate. satellites need space between them, though perhaps this would be in a less occupied orbit, I don't know.
* If it is geo-stationary, which I would think would be necessary, wouldn't it have some period in darkness at some point during its day? I am asking, I really am not sure though I guess I could google it.
Though, if it was in its own orbit then I guess the space debris would be less of an issue as well.
Just some thoughts.
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
we take no jokes on subjects like Tesla
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OK, one, we need more info. If there really is a way to focus any sort of EM past the diffraction wavelength, this is a serious breakthrough. We should not discount the possibilities of serious breakthroughs -- like Buckminsterfullerene, made by ten drunken grad students and a drunk professor and a drunk sports coach at a cheap wine party with chemistry-department spiked punch at Rice. Two, if you can actually beat the diffraction limit, then the yellow-light angstroms would be the way to go, not microwave. Or maybe orange. You don't want to increase red with the glaciers melting, and UV or x-ray are probably not a good idea either, what with massive ozone holes already. Sure, microwaves require very little power to transmit, but they're also notoriously inefficient, unless you're frying seagulls with the fire-control radar on a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, in which case, who cares? Three, screw the Heinlein worship. You can't broadcast beamed power from space. It's called "atmosphere." He was wrong about low-G prolonging life, too, remember? Not his fault that he grew up on less science that we teach in third grade now. Finally, efficiency ratios are the killers. You gotta spend energy to get energy. If you can beat 1.5, you can make money. Otherwise, get used to walking, and hope you can grow enough of your own food to make it worth it.
... a remote object sending radiation to the earth ... I call it the S.U.N. or SUN if you are lazy.
I see you've been modded Informative, so I'm not sure everybody realizes that the above product is an April Fool's joke that's been around since at least 2007 - click on the Add to Cart button to see their April Fools message.
This has been a public service announcement by Mattski.
It's a gun. Phaser, here we come.
Bruce Perens.
In that case, you have to decide which kind of terrestrial power to choose: coal, oil, solar, gas, wind, nuclear--all of which have their drawbacks. So, to an extent, you're back at square one. Idiot, without oil and infinite energy, there would be a hell lot less wars. Only terrorism
Good point, & if it DOES do so?
Well, it only serves to prove that Nikola Tesla (one of my technical/intellectual heros) was indeed, more than 100 yrs. ahead of his time...
See, Nikola Tesla (around 100 yrs. ago almost) allegedly had it working already!
However, George Westinghouse (Tesla's financier/backer picked up Tesla's contract after Edison ripped him off after Tesla improved direct current by nearly 25% w/ out massive amounts of repeater/amplifier stations (vs. signal attenuation probably)) wasn't "with it" for business reasons!
(Basically iirc, Westinghouse told Tesla: "That's great Nikola, & amazing but... how would we meter & bill it by the kilowatt hours used?" when he was showed this marvel)...
Sure wouldn't be the FIRST TIME business & greed have hosed us from living better lives (kind of like today, w/ alcohol OR hydrogen burning vehicles, vs. oil!
(Big oil is holding us down mostly, but then again, as David Bowie as TESLA stated in the film "The Prestige": "Society only tolerates 1 large change @ a time")
I.E. - we all can't go out & buy new alcohol or hydrogen burning vehicles @ once (not all can afford to do so, for instance, I just bought a new car recently, can't afford to just get yet another & no real need, yet).
APK
P.S.=> Iirc, Tesla used the "resonant harmonic" of the earth as his transmission media... this doesn't sound like that @ all, or really about WIRELESS POWER! apk
I've mentioned this in other comments, but space is really really big. I mean, think about it - even if you ignore different orbits, there's more space "surface area" than there is land "surface area". We're a long way away from running out of space up there.
I also mentioned that it would probably be cheaper to launch a small fleet of non-geosynchronous satellites, although again I don't know the numbers and this is basically speculation.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
As for your last point, the land-based receivers are quite obviously much smaller than the equivalent amount of solar panels would be.
As for the first two points, once again I'm not saying that space satellites are necessarily better. I'm just saying they're different. Neither of us knows the exact numbers involved.
For #2, for example, land cost is a recurring cost over time thanks to property and land taxes, while launching a satellite only has to be done once. And launches are getting cheaper, and surface area up there is much cheaper than it is down here while weight is much more expensive than it is down here. Which ends up being cheaper overall? I have no idea.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
I think you are correct that the technique is related to phase-shift masking. Yes, the article is incomplete for failing to mention that some progress has been made past the 'classical' diffraction limit.
You mention the many design constraints which must be satisfied to be successful. Some of these limitations are probably due to the limited range of properties achievable in available masking materials.
The more generalized technique requires use of 'meta-materials' with properties which can be exotic (e.g., negative refractive index) and can be varied to suit.
The planar material can be more easily manufactured, making it one more step toward actual application. In other words...
Invent meta-materials
??? <-- Insert new development
Profit!