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Tesla Would Be Proud: Wireless Charging For Electric Cars Gets Closer To Reality
curtwoodward writes "For some reason, we're still plugging in electric-powered devices like a bunch of savages. But technology developed at MIT could soon make that a thing of the past, at least for hybrid cars. A small Boston-area company, WiTricity, is a key part of Toyota's growing experiment with wireless charging tech---something the world's largest car maker says it will start seriously testing in the U.S., Japan and Europe next year. The system works by converting AC to a higher frequency and voltage and sending it to a receiver that resonates at the same frequency, making it possible to transfer the power safely via magnetic field. Intel and Foxconn are also investors, and you might see them license the tech soon as well."
Whether or not it catches on will depend mostly on efficiency. If the losses are minimal, it makes sense to eliminate mechanical connections.
The fundamental physical principles of electromechanics have always allowed this, but safety and efficiency concerns couldn't really be mitigated without good sensors.
When I read Tesla in the title, my first thought was the car manufacturer. It wasn't until a few minutes later I realized it was referring to the inventor. If someone would kindly give me the proper address, I will hand in my nerd card. I'm sorry, everyone.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Only someone trying to sell wireless charging tech would describe people who plug in as savages.
If you want to pay 10% more to charge your car at slow L2 speeds because you're too lazy to spend 10 seconds plugging it in at night and unplugging it in the morning, who am I to try and stop you?
Unless the efficiency is high, you're basically paying more to charge your car than if you just plugged it in.
As a high school senior I asked why devices could get power wirelessly to my physics teacher. He laughed and said that would be too dangerous and not viable. Being a 16 year/old kid I said ok. Now if I was really smart I would have built a wireless power source.
It's called a transformer. It transmits energy from one coil to another via a time-varying magnetic field and Ampere's Law, just like Qi and other "wireless" chargers do.
That they're doing it at a higher frequency is nothing novel or innovative.
Man in Georgia (USA) gets arrested for charging his Honda Leaf at school (value 5 cents).
Will there be safeguards that if the system detects a "charge hotspot" it first checks for authorization before tapping the source.
Will I just install a pad in my driveway? What if you don't have a one?
The biggest problem I've found is that I live in a city without designated parking/ a garage/ anything of that matter, which makes it just about impossible to buy an electric car. Until there's a charging post on every spot, and all street parking converted into angle parking to accommodate the charging stations, you're missing out on a large percentage of where people live, and no other option except combustion engines. I am hoping you smart folks can offer suggestions on this issue.
To find the next clue, you need to be both like a tree and the Matterhorn.
They just don't have the charge required to move forward.
*da dum ching*
Italy has been using this for buses since 2003.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/08/induction-charged-buses/
All we need to do is put poles with flexible wire strips on top of the cars and then put a wire mesh over all the roads that can be electrified so the cars can be charged while driving.
Works for bumper cars anyway!
(I used to joke about this but I really foresee the day when we charge our cars using a USB x.0 cable to both charge the car and sync its data (stereo, playlists, etc) nightly like we do our phones and tablets...)
because they are energy efficient, and we're going to use wireless charging because it isn't? A wireless system will NEVER match the efficiency of plugging the thing in with wires.
I own a Leaf, and I plug it in every night, using (gasp!) A WIRE!!! [insert dramatic music here]
I can't imagine myself ever going wireless for in-home charging simply because of the cost. Why pay what is surely a 4-figure sum for convenience and less efficient charging, when all I have to do is stick a plug in the nose cone of the car? It takes under 30 seconds, you can't get any more efficient, and I don't even think about it any more -- I just plug in and forget it.
Wireless public charging could make sense, especially for areas where drivers might not want to leave a plug hanging out of their car overnight.
Not sure we want those amounts of energy shooting through the ether, and our bodies. Energy is energy no matter what frequency at which it's transmitted. I'd rather be able to avoid dirty air than something I can't see.
... for having ignored all his life work for this long time.
Not if you could get arrested just for parking your EV in a local school parking lot.
What kind of radiation are they using? Can it penetrate the skin?
If someone walks or stands between a transmitter and a receiver, will he get a burn / cancer?
Tesla was all about free energy for the people.
Intel and Foxconn are also investors, and you might see them license the tech soon as well
Me don't thinks Tesla would be proud of that.
The amperage needed to charge an EV in a reasonable amount of time is very high! To transfer that much energy through induction is going to require that the induction pad be as powerful as a Magnetic Resonance Imaging system, or higher.
That would be some dangerous stuff.I don;t want to be near the likes of this.
Gee folks, the laws of physics pretty much govern how "wireless" transmission of energy works. Using magnetic fields to transfer power from here to there is not new, we've been doing it long before Edison and Westinghouse where fighting it out over AC verses DC over 100 years ago. Westinghouse used "transformers" way back then so transferring power from one coil of wire to another though a magnetic field is not new.
But they are using a different frequency! That's new right? Not so fast... Designers have been using higher frequencies in transformers for a long time now. Aircraft have routinely used 400 Cycle power systems so designers could use smaller (and lighter) transformers since before WWII. Further, we now routinely use frequencies in the Kilohertz in switching power supplies for the same reason. More efficiency, smaller size and weight by using higher frequencies.
But they really haven't solved anything or come up with anything new. They will suffer efficiency losses because their magnetic flux coupling is weak due to the distances involved, they will suffer from limited ability to transfer power because the maximum flux density of air is pretty low, and they will have to add significant weight to the cars being charged by adding large coils of wire with many turns to them.
Nothing new to see here..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Not everywhere you park your car has a plug.
And even fewer places, that you park or drive your car, will EVER have inductive charging pads.
The static application of this, automatic charging while parked over a mat in a garage is not that interesting really. But what if sections of a similar technology was installed in interstates that could charge a car on the move? Cars with a receiving system, and a way to verify and bill the driver for the electricity while moving. We would then have electric cars with potentially infinite range.
That application we could take a bit of inefficiency for the convenience added.
to prevent people from stealing your electricity...
For some reason, we're still plugging in electric-powered devices like a bunch of savages.
Look, I know you're aiming for "snarky quasi-ironic elitist who can afford an electric car and lives in an area with a strong electric car infrastructure", but you're coming off as "infomercial for people too stupid to properly operate a blanket".
Oh for mod points. Quite right.
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
With all the hype about cell phone radiation, what do you think it would be for a car charger? Of course the idea of having a loop on my garage floor that begins to charge when I park the car is very interesting. It'll probably have to have some interlock to make sure no people are nearby.
It's not that fitting a square plug into a square hole is a problem.... its' that my wife doesn't want to get grime, dirt and salt on her hands to plug the car in. She wants to grab her purse and walk in the house. Convienance is the driving (pun??) factor here.
Jeez just have some sprung conductors in the floor of your garage that come up and touch corresponding contact points on the underside of the car whenever you park.
For safety, Include some trivial electronics to only power the conductors after a data handshake happens with the car. This both ensures the car is in contact properly and that its not say, your kids bike.
Can you go to jail for parking in a public lot and then have the cops show up 11 days later to hull you to jail?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/12/04/1817227/ev-owner-arrested-over-5-cents-worth-of-electricity-from-schools-outlet
The caveat here is Witricity's patented light weight tuned "antenna". I took a tour of there facility once they have some neat stuff, the efficiency was pretty good at low power for large gaps... I can't imagine that it'll scale up to kW well tho.
In the U.S. during the 1970s, there was quite a bit of hysteria regarding the dangers of living near sources of electromagnetic radiation. A typical story would associate childhood leukemia with living in proximity of high-tension lines. Is EM radiation no longer considered a health problem now?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
YOU aren't familiar with the difference between power transfer by way of magnetic induction, and power transfer by way of *resonant* magnetic induction, so THEY haven't done anything new. :sigh:
There's a TED Talk where the prototype-level version of this technology was demoed. It's a few years old at this stage. It doesn't require minute distances, it has lower power losses than your typical 'wall wart' AC/DC converter, and transfer efficiency doesn't drop off with the square of the range.
Is the cord really a big problem when charging an electric car? I mean, I've never felt the need to have a gas pump that would squirt fuel right into the filler neck without using a hose...
I would have thought the biggest stumbling block to widespread charging infrastructure would be the truly ridiculous power feed that would be needed to charge a significant number of cars along long-haul routes.
It won't scale up in power level. The usable flux density of air is going to throw a physics law wrench in their works. The distance between the car and the source is going to impose severe limits, unless there are some serious problems with our understanding of basic physics (which is highly unlikely at this point.)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Charging my car and my devices while driving down the road is extremely efficient. The cost of infrastructure required to support this gain in efficiency is another discussion.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
The bandwidth of a truck full of magnetic tapes goes to zero as everything is erased.
-- hendrik
why not line the freeway?
charge while you drive it.
Want a 300 mile range?
put 100 miles of chargers for every 300 miles of road..
Recreate the electric bus, powered externally.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
They have had wireless charging for a decade for larger vehicles. the Golf carts at the local golf course have done this for at least 10 years. you drive on a rubber mat and the golf cart starts charging, Exact same thing for a car unless they claim they can charge the car from dead to full in 20 minutes, then I highly doubt it as inductive charging cant handle that much power in a wide air gap transformer (This is what "wireless" charging is)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Cmon, converting electric power to radio frequency AC is at best 80% efficient, and coupling it maybe 50% at best, and converting it back to DC 80% again. I get 32% best efficiency and those are for the most optimum situation. No way this will ever fly, economically. And since people are scared of their water meters e-field of a fraction of a watt, how are they going to feel about megawatts? Not gonna fly, or even crawl.
Just don't leave your wallet in your car, or the mag strips on your credit cards might stop working...
Or your laptop with its old magnetic hard drive..
Transferring kilowatts of power via magnetic fields is going to have some losses.
Conductive rubber tires.
Park on metal plates and if two of the 4 tires are on different plates, you can pull power. Just don't walk over them in bare feet.
And they said all of those hours I spent practicing F-Zero were wasted!
That's what we need. A multi-thousand KWh device charging at pathetically low efficiency as a gimmick because people are too lazy to touch a cable to a socket. I'm going to take a wild guess that the entire neighborhood better not be using wifi or cell phones either because that level of EM can't possibly fail to affect things.
Here is my idea: Automatic vacuum cleaners search for their charging spot before running out of power. Do apply this "search for power" to a car, something like this: You park your car on top of a simple robotic charger (it can even take control of the car when in very close proximity), the charger looks for your cars contacts, negotiates a secret token, the car opens its contacts, and the charger plugs to it with proper hi-power copper plugs. No noisy, cancer producing, water boiling wireless charging, and full efficiency. Once charge is done, it disconnect and everything goes to sleep. Want to have better climate inside your car before you go? Push the button on your mobile, and the robot (re)connects and supplies the power for the air conditioning. Want to leave before charging is done? No problem, push the power button long enough and the charger unplugs, returns vehicle control to the driver and "off" you go! :D
This technology is already available http://www.pluglesspower.com/
Tesla assumed that power would be too cheap to meter and thus efficiency wouldn't be an issue, but that never really panned out
Tesla grokked physics, and said that one day our machinery would be harnessed to "the wheelwork of nature". We are still using Tesla version 0.8 alpha (AC Power distribution). It is better than Edison's vision of a DC generator in every neighborhood, but version 1.0 of Tesla's vision - energy from the aether - would be better still.
Tesla's vision hasn't "panned out", yet, because the energy industry is central to JP Morgan's vision for Electrodynamics. This called for a power a meter on every home.
Rupert Sheldrake's Ted talk - the Science Delusion - has some good points too...
Oh so they invented some *new* thing that I don't understand? Snake oil I say.
Look, in this part of my studies as a Electrical Engineer, I can assure you that they've not *invented* anything. Transferring power using magnetic fields requires you create an ever changing magnetic flux though the receiving coil of wire. Using a tuned circuit doesn't change how the physics of magnetic flux work only the circuits connected to the wire coils. It's still going to boil down to how much flux change can you get cutting though the receiving coil's wire to generate current. The physics don't change here, I don't care what circuits you use to generate the magnetic field or draw power from it.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101