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."

Comments

Slowly sip the power!

[slack_justyb]

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.

Re:Slowly sip the power!

[Ichijo]

Don't worry, the problem of people trying to charge their mobile devices in the middle of the road will solve itself fairly quickly.

Re:Slowly sip the power!

[wierd_w]

I would presume that while the field is quite robust, that the rate of alternation will be either absurdly fast, or very slow.

The first poses a risk of magstrips on credit cards of pedestrians and cyclists being wiped due to hysteresis. (The whole road would be one giant bulk eraser!) The latter makes this less likely, but is less efficient for AC power transfer over long distances of roadbed.

I suspect it will be a slow oscillation based charger, because a moving vehicle trying to get a stable wave for its charging circuit will have "short" moments of interaction with the individual coils in the roadbed as it drives over the top, causing significant headache. This in addition to being less likely to wipe magstrips on credit cards, and the like.

A slow oscillator will be more difficult to draw "large" quantities of electricity from, as the collector would need to be quite large and conspicuous.

Re:Slowly sip the power!

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... 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

A horsepower is 3/4 kW. Braking down from 50 MPH turns enough energy into heat to heat a snowbound house with only moderate insulation, in the dead of temperate-zone winter, for half an hour.

Running your laptop or charging your cellphone, like the incandescent lights in cars, is a very tiny drop in a very large lake.

Running about ten households on it is comparable to running an extra car continuously. (Cruising at highway speed takes high teens of HP - it's getting up to speed in a reasonable time that requires those big engines.) But it would also require enough of a pickup to constitute a traffic hazard, which would bring you to the attention of authorities.

Those buried conductors are what make repaving an intersection in US a bit more expensive than say the straight road

Note that they are talking about powering patches of the road (5% to 15%), not the whole thing. The car stores the power for the stretches between the patches. Such patches can be on straight sections where vehicles don't do things that cause extra wear. Also: A few dead patches don't kill the road - they just mean the car pulls a little more out of the battery before the road brings it back to full charge.

As another poster mentioned: Repaving a road with a concrete slab base only tweaks the top inch or two. The slabs can last a half-century or more. If the coils, cores, and local wiring can be embedded in or below the slab, with a couple inches of extra gap between the top of the core and the surface of the road, it can last a very long time.

With the "hot" sections of reasonable size and modular, I imagine a dead one could be replaced, slab and all, in an overnight or over-weekend operation, scheduled for when the road is not too busy and lane closures or detours are available.

Re:Slowly sip the power!

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I would presume that while the field is quite robust, that the rate of alternation will be either absurdly fast, or very slow.

RTFA - or at least look at the pictures (it's in the caption of one): Feed to the coils in the road is 20 kHz, 200A.

Re:Slowly sip the power!

[hawguy]

I suspect it will be a slow oscillation based charger, because a moving vehicle trying to get a stable wave for its charging circuit will have "short" moments of interaction with the individual coils in the roadbed as it drives over the top, causing significant headache. This in addition to being less likely to wipe magstrips on credit cards, and the like.

A slow oscillator will be more difficult to draw "large" quantities of electricity from, as the collector would need to be quite large and conspicuous.

Why speculate (wrongly) when you can click through to the article?

The SMFIR technology, also developed by KAIST, works by running power through the underground cables at a frequency of 20 kHz, creating a 20 kHz electromagnetic field. The underbelly of the bus also includes a wire or coil that is tuned to recognize the frequency and then use an inverter to create electricity through magnetic resonance.

Re:Slowly sip the power!

[wierd_w]

What!? Read the article!? Sir, do you know what site this is!? (/joke)

In seriousness though, 20khz at 200A is enough to wipe magnetic strips in the wallets of pedestrians, and possibly to energize braces in people's mouths. (The metals used do leave ion concentrations in the saliva, making the mouth into a lytic cap, with the braces as the pickup and dielectric.) The concrete will be somewhat paramagnetic, but probably not enough to prevent the field from reaching up pretty high above the roadbed.

I sure hope they aren't installing it in areas where pedestrian traffic will be high. The potential for nuked credit cards opens a big legal liability.

Re:Slowly sip the power!

[CastrTroy]

Do they even use mag strip credit cards in South Korea? My credit cards and debit cards still have mag stripes on them, but I very seldom am presented with a machine that actually reads the stripe. Most have switched to the chip technology years ago. And I just live in Canada. I'm sure a more forward thinking country like Korea wouldn't even bother with mag stripes. Except, perhaps, for the sole purpose of being compatible with the United Statesian machines when travelling.

Re:Slowly sip the power!

[tlhIngan]

In seriousness though, 20khz at 200A is enough to wipe magnetic strips in the wallets of pedestrians, and possibly to energize braces in people's mouths. (The metals used do leave ion concentrations in the saliva, making the mouth into a lytic cap, with the braces as the pickup and dielectric.) The concrete will be somewhat paramagnetic, but probably not enough to prevent the field from reaching up pretty high above the roadbed.

I sure hope they aren't installing it in areas where pedestrian traffic will be high. The potential for nuked credit cards opens a big legal liability.

You know, you don't keep pumping the field out when there's no bus on top of it and waste energy. Given you have a coil, it's stupidly easy to put out a weak detection field where you can look for a resonance and then apply power when you detect the bus. When the bus leaves the area, the controller detects the detuning and turns off the field.

And if the controller is smarter, it can signal controllers ahead of it to energize as well.

This isn't your dumb wireless charger you have at home to charge your Nexus or other consumer device. These things are smart and they have to be given the power involved.

I've always dreamed of this

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

The moment when you can finally steal the bumper cars from the amusement park and drive them home.