Universities, Gov't Testing Magnetic Resonance Charging For EVs In Transit (computerworld.com)

Lucas123 writes: At least two universities are testing the use of magnetic resonance and mobile receivers to charge electric vehicles while they're on roadways. Partially funded by a multi-million dollar DOE grant, Clemson University's International Center for Automotive Research has been testing stationary wireless vehicle charging and is now preparing to test mobile wireless recharging for vehicles.In the U.K., the government is expected to perform off-road trials of dynamic wireless charging that it acquired from researchers at North Carolina State University. The idea behind dynamic wireless charging is to create a series of embedded highway stations that can incrementally recharge EV carrying mobile receivers as the vehicles drive by. The vehicles would use a Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) technology to communicate with roadway chargers. DSRC can support both stationary wireless charging and in-motion wireless charging with the same system architecture. DSRC is already being used in crash avoidance systems and is expected to be required over the next five years, so the charging technology could piggyback on the DSRC modules already installed.

Comments

Re:Lenz's law

[thesupraman]

with regard to the inmotion charging..

Not to mention the fact that you better not be carrying anything magnetizable or magnetically erasable while you drive anywhere near these things.
The power density would have to be astronomical - have this really got past back of the envelope analysis?

Even if you assume a vehicle is only using 15HP to maintain itself in steady state cruise, thats a little over 11kW.
Allow for inefficiency in the motors and storage/drive, call it 15kW steady state
Allow for losses in the transmission and reception of the energy over a decent airgap and with a moving target, you are probably looking well over 20kW.
Now, say the charging stations are 5 minutes drive apart, and you spend 30 second over their 'charge grids' (those will be some LONG grids..)
you will now need a power rate of around 200kW to be transfered continuously for 30 seconds to provide enough energy.

Could all the people willing to sit in close proximity to a 200kW field, at speed, for 10% of their driving time please raise their hands?

Even the idea of stationary contactless charging is just foolish - why not simply attach contacts and increase the safety/efficiency massively.

I smell pork, lots and lots of nice fat goverment funded pork. Facts never get in the way of pork..

What an incredibly stupid idea...

[rgbatduke]

... even with mod points to burn I can't resist weighing in on this one. Some ideas are just too dumb for words. Just what sort of energy efficiencies do they think that they are going to manage? Who is going to pay for this "free" (incredibly inefficient) energy? Just how much power will they have to deliver to even break even on a moving vehicle, and how much power will their "transmitter" have to radiate in order for the car's pickup to be able to receive enough power?

Shades of Nikolai Tesla! Why not just put up megawatt Tesla coils ever fifty meters and leave them on all the time! This is an idea that was proven stupid 100 years ago.

But hey, the government has lots of (my) money. I'll just try to think of it as scientific welfare, sort of like climate science. Too bad they aren't spending it on something that isn't quite so obviously a boondoggle, though.

rgb