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 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?
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.
Photovoltaic "paint" is being perfected. We have large sections of the world where cars could be powered by solar energy with panels on the side of the road as well as the road itself absorbing solar energy and then distributing the energy to the vehicles.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
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.
You erect solar panels _over_ the road, which is wasted space anyway. This does a lot of good things:
1) Keeps the rainfall off the road to minimize the chance of hydroplaning
2) Keeps snow off the road to minimize skidding and road blockage
3) Produces a whale of a lot of power
4) Keeps the sun off the vehicle to reduce air conditioning requirements
5) Keeps the sun off the vehicle to minimize driver blinding
Vague being the fact they said: EVEN IF this was more efficient and not DESPITE this being more efficient. To give one the impression this is more efficient without actually saying so...
I can't imagine this is very efficient at all. Probably good for smog control in cities if widely adopted.
Almost sounds like something called a Metro (or subway)
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs