Slashdot Mirror
World's First Road-Powered Electric Vehicle Network Opens
Daniel_Stuckey writes "South Korea continues to pull out all the stops on the long road to a high-tech utopia. Last year, the city Yeosu hosted the Expo 2012, an international exhibition that highlighted emerging technology and design that attracted 8 million visitors over three months. Today, the nation has finally unveiled the world's first road-powered electric vehicle network for regular use. Here's how it works: the network runs on newly-built roads that have electric cables and wires embedded below the surface. This allows for the magnetic-resonance transfer of energy to the network's vehicles, which not only already run on small batteries (about a third of the size of a typical electric vehicle) but also do not require the plug-in-and-recharge process common to other electric cars."
Okay so is it just me or is anyone else thinking that it wouldn't take a high school education to understand how to sap power from the road for free for powering your cell phone, laptop, or for the real inventive some parts of your house. Maybe that's just the cynic in me talking.
Also, roads tend to wear pretty fast. So I am hoping that they have the ability to strip the asphalt around the conductors as opposed to having to replace the conductors when the road wears down. Those buried conductors are what make repaving an intersection in US a bit more expensive than say the straight road, but seeing how the intersection is but a small segment of the road entirely (except for New Jersey, admit it, your roads are that bad) it kind of balances out.
Copenhagen's city center was shut for a few hours today because of one of them fancy road-powered electric vehicles being treated as a potential bomb. This one seems to have been built in a garage by a Swedish mad scientist, though.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The article made vague statements about efficiency, but curious if induction transfer to a vehicle really is even more efficient than a battery, or how it compares to an ICE. If better, then great idea, but TFA is very thin on details.
Maybe I'm just a bit weary.
I'll be happy once this is more common in a town not mine and people with pacemakers aren't dying every time they cross a road.
Yes, we already gathered from the summary that this is the first of its kind. Tell us something we don't know.
We can't do this in America without touching the 3rd rail of American politics.
The moment when you can finally steal the bumper cars from the amusement park and drive them home.
God spoke to me
I mentions nothing in the article but what does that do to those of us with steel in our bodies? I for one cannot get an MRI due to it. Or is the field just too weak?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Road powered electric vehicles are awesome, I'm glad to see someone doing it, but I'm a little worried about safety and efficiency with the inductive charging technology. I certainly wouldn't want to be right on top of a 20khz rf transmitter that's pumping out tens of kilowatts. I don't remember the permissible exposure limits off the top of my head, but this sounds like it would be way above what's considered acceptable for HAM radio. Is there some way to keep that RF energy from spilling all over the place? How much of that energy actually makes it to the car, and how much is lost to RF, heat, noise, etc..?
The description is confusing, but the picture is clear - it's a split-transformer system. It's not clear whether it's a continuous one for vehicles in motion or one that just recharges a bus at bus stops. Berkeley, California had one of those in the 1980s, built as a CALTRANS R&D project. That system had energy transfer efficiency of about 65%. They tried 400Hz (which induced annoying hum in metal objects) and 8500Hz (which didn't.) "Pedestrians who walk across the powered roadway inductor are exposed to 10,000 milligauss (10 gauss) at a height of 1 ft and about 1,000 milligauss (1 gauss) at a height of 4 ft above the center of the inductor's conductor slot."
ACGIH TLVs 2008 safety guidelines: "From 300 Hz to 30 kHz the ceiling whole or partial body exposure should not exceed 0.2 mT" (2 gauss). So the CALTRANS system did not meet current safety standards. Does anyone have the numbers for the Korean system?
Get your shit together.
Putting people inside microwave ovens on wheels is not nice.
Those cables carry a pretty high voltage and current, and presumably have to be near the surface for the EM field to be effective, and the road pavement tend to wear pretty fast. The cables may have a good insulation, but that might be eroded by vehicles if the pavement is broken in some points. So I hope they considered the risks for people walking on the street; anyway, innovative solutions to pollution problems are always welcome.
You loose battery fast i presume.... so we buy trains now?
All we need now is the tar to be converted to solar panels and we have a self-sustaining means af transport. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/solar-road-panels-offer-asphalt-alternative-a-901792.html
I'm not well versed in EM science at all (I know if I plug electronics into the magic holes in the wall, they work, and that's about it). But I do know that some EM fields can interfere with pacemakers. And I'm assuming they don't have to be that strong as some household power tools are enough to blip the things. Are the fields discussed in the article strong enough to be a problem for people with heart-regulating implants?
Not sure whether to mod you +1 Funny or +1 Horror..
Hivemind harvest in progress..
is to put the car on a rail somehow, and let the road control the throttle, and the driver programs the road about where he wants to go. Then he gets in the back seat and goes to sleep until the car arrives. Makes for a really low-stress commute.
Come on! No one mentioned how these vehicles wont be able to get off the Grid by choice? Light cycles anyone?
I had the opportunity to chat with one of the team at the Brisbane Australian Electric Vehicle Association meeting, I raised the absurdly high power emf field with him and he said a lot of the money was spent on effectively shielding around the pickups and the system only switches on when there is a car or bus on top of it and it requires about 25% of the trip to be under charge which equates to a lot less than 25% of the distance as the route is analysed for the charging to happen where the vehicle is stopped or going slow. Perfect for buses. The cable under the road is encased in a slab of concrete. Solar charging and roadside storage of power will definitely be an option. I suspect the emf levels in an EV are pretty off the scale anyway. The alternator in a car is pretty full on anyhow. There are circuits on the front of the bus that turn the system on via bluetooth or some such system and yes you will be able to buy the pickup one day to fit onto your own EV and have it charge your credit card for the juice.
I had the opportunity to chat with one of the team at the Brisbane Australian Electric Vehicle Association meeting, I raised the absurdly high power emf field with him and he said a lot of the money was spent on effectively shielding around the pickups which lie across the underside of the car and the system only switches on when there is a car or bus on top of it. There are circuits on the front of the bus that turn the system on via blootooth or somesuch system and yes you will be able to buy the pickup one day to fit onto your own EV and have it charge your credit card for the juice. It requires about 25% of the trip to be under charge which equates to a lot less than 25% of the distance as the route is analysed for the charging to happen where the vehicle is stopped or going slow. Perfect for buses. The cable under the road is encased in a slab of concrete and it turns on a piece at a time. Solar charging and roadside battery storage of power will definitely be an option and the grid could cope easily. I suspect the emf levels in an EV are pretty off the scale anyway. The alternator in a car is pretty full on anyhow. If you had the system on your regular commute it would save on batteries what you might spend on the pickup and make for a lighter and therefore more efficient car.
Almost sounds like something called a Metro (or subway)
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs