Slashdot Mirror
Gov't Researchers Develop Wireless Car Chargers That Are Faster Than Plug-ins (computerworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Computerworld: The U.S. Department of Energy has demonstrated a 20,000 watt (20KW) wireless car-charging system that offers three times the efficiency of today's plug-in systems for electric vehicles (EVs). The research is the first step in creating a 50KW wireless charging system that may someday allow roadways to charge vehicles while they are being driven. The DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee demonstrated the new system in partnership with Toyota, Cisco Systems, Evatran and the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research. ORNL said the 20KW charging system for passenger cars is the world's highest power wireless system. It was developed in less than three years using a "unique architecture that included an ORNL-built inverter, isolation transformer, vehicle-side electronics and coupling technologies."
Just don't let your cat in the garage or it'll lay on the warm inductive plate and get crisped.
Captcha: E scrote
err.
Excrete, my bad.
A Tesla charger has an efficiency of over 90%. If this charger has an efficiency three times that, then it should be above 270%. Maybe it can feed the extra 170% back into the grid.
The actual quote from the article is " achieved 90 percent efficiency at three times the rate of the plug-in systems commonly used for electric vehicles today.", not three times the efficiency. They're comparing the charger to a typical home charger. Which is meaningless since the system isn't limited by the connection to the car. And think about it. 10% loss of charging energy so you don't have to go to all the trouble of plugging it in? What a waste of our tax dollars.
Can't find any clue as to what frequency is being used for the charger. The prospect of 50 kW of power in your garage or wherever is worrying, despite being "well shielded". Even if it's a lower frequency (in the kHz range), there will be harmonics all over the spectrum, putting radio amateurs and anyone else using sensitive radio gear in a bind.
Fiat Lux.
Download Film Captain America : Civil War 2016 Subtitle Indonesia BluRay 760P http://kriezmovies.mywapblog.c...
The wireless charging system is not faster than all plug-in chargers, just the ones commonly used at home. The charge stations available commercially are faster and the article mentions this. It is also not three times more efficient, it's 3x faster than the home charging systems. It's 90% percent efficient, which is impressive but I seriously doubt any charging system is only 30% efficient.
Think globally but act within local variable scope.
There's an abundance of research showing that strong electric and magnetic fields can be hazardous. For example, magnetic resonance imaging involves exposure to a strong magnetic field. It's also been shown that too much exposure causes cancer. Likewise, continual exposure to strong electric fields can cause cancer. True wireless charging, not the kind that involves resting the device on a charging surface, is inefficient and requires the presence of a strong electric field. Long term exposure to that is probably quite dangerous, especially if the chargers are located in homes. Cars require a lot of power, and therefore they're likely to require stronger electric fields that are more likely to cause cancer. While it may be possible to charge quickly without plugging in, that doesn't mean it's safe. I also don't trust the matter to be investigated in a reasonably unbiased manner. For example, there's a lot of money at stake with cellular phones, so I don't trust research commissioned by businesses to accurately reflect the risk of cancer. There's also a lot money in the automobile industry, so I don't think we can trust car companies who have a history of cheating on emissions testing to tell us whether their wireless charging is safe. It's a neat idea, but I'm quite concerned that it will add to the already drastic increase in cancer in the modern world.
I can't wait until the patent gets handed off to somebody to profit from.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Yes yes, terrible summary.
The 'fun' part is the 10% coupling waste (versus I would imagine much less than 1% for plugin charging).
Remember, we are not talking about the battery charge efficiency here, their 10% is just for the transfer of power to the car..
So, thats 'only' 2kw continuous loss. Thank god everyone is converting their houses to LED lighting, which still wont
offset the losses here.
Go Progress!
If it is wireless, it is NOT EFFICIENT.
50kw, or even 20kw is extremely dangerous to couple. Outside of the leaking RF spectrum possibly interfering with electronics, the danger is something with a similar resonant field could be nearby and absorb some of that power. Even just a few tens of watts could start a fire. They probably need something akin to a gfci circuit that monitors the power in and out precisely and if something is absorbing power that shouldn't be, notice the discrepancy and terminate the charge.
The actual picture is pretty funny, with a ginormous briefcase put under the back of the vehicle, a mere 2 inches above the similar unit embedded in the floor. No way is that remotely practical, they would need to increase the air gap by at least triple, to 5x+ to properly mount it under reasonable vehicles. To keep the same coupling, the size would then have to be increased substantially. Further there is no way in hell that is working while you drive, it has to be precisely aligned which isn't going to happen period, even at stoplights. I could see it embedded into a garage stall, or even a parking stall outdoors, perhaps, but alignment would be a major issue and one that is not being addressed at this stage from anything I can gather.
Neat stuff, I'm sure. But transportation fuel will always be in the form of liquid molecules or solid anodes that are made in big factories in bulk at much higher efficiencies than possible with electrical transmission and run air-breathing engines with designs that don't need to pack fuel and oxidizer in close proximity. Unless you let the fully-baked hippies try to wish physics away with half-baked tree-hugger politics, that is.
As an added bonus, this system will cook any road-kill to perfection. Even cows! Moooooooooooo Cows! You're all a bunch of cooked road-kill cows! Mooooooooo!
you just know it's going to lose to a trick play whether it's Florida St in 1988 or Alabama in the BCS Championship game in 2016.
This is really just one crapflooder who has found a way to abuse Slashdot's posting limits and flood it with offtopic crap. If you're a moderator, please mod this shit down so the crapflooder gets a temporary IP ban and goes away for the night.
Whiplash, this has been brought to your attention many times. While I don't agree with censoring posts like this through the lameness filter, they are offtopic and disruptive. You have unlimited mod points because you're an editor. Why not hit all of this imbecile's posts with offtopic mods to put him at -1 and give him temporary IP bans?
They're putting a lot of high-tech into doing wireless charging when all they really need is some well designed connectors, industrial actuators and a cheap computer vision system to plugin and charge a parked car.
If you're really intent on having no electrical contact, then magnetically couple with a split-core transformer that's divided between car and charger. It's low tech and gets you in the same efficiency ballpark (or better) relatively easily and with a lot less potential for EMI.
Why is gov doing corporate R&D?????????? Why are tax dollar being spent to improve the profit margins of a select group of companies???
...government charges YOU!!!
resoun3 as fiiting play parties the
20kw is nowhere near three times the efficiency of an average charger.
Home chargers for Tesla offer 20kw (22kw in EU) for usual setup.
Superchargers offer a lot more - 135kw for Tesla superchargers, 50kw for regular EU charging stations.
Tesla Model S was the best selling EV in the US last year (yes, it outsold the next best - the Leaf, in number of units, not just sales $) - source http://insideevs.com/monthly-p....
Typical home charger for a Tesla is the mobile connector which delivers 10KW charging from a dryer outlet. Owners have an option to install a 20KW Tesla plug-in charger in their garages, which many people do. Tesla plug-in "superchargers" charge up to 120KW, so 20KW wireless is not 3 times the rate of any of those plug-in chargers (it's actually only 1/6th of the most powerful one). It probably is 3x the rate of the original, discontinued a couple of years ago, RAV4 EV charger, but saying it's 3x the rate of plug-in chargers used today is incorrect. Lastly, there are public chargers limited to ~6.6KW, but their limit is not because of the fact that they are wired, it's mostly their power source (the J1772 connector used by most of those can handle up to 20KW).
If you think there are no health effects from high energy electro-magnetic fields, you will learn at your own expense. Even motorized toothbrushes have been inducing headaches via their inductive chanrging coils when used by kids and sensitive adults. The power supply and high-frequency inverter of military night-vision goggles needs to be placed at the back of the head for counter-balance purposes and the EM gives many a "vomit grade" migraine. To be a spec-ops soldier or helicopter pilot requires immunity to this and only a few supermen's nervous systems are fit enough to wear and use these FLIR sights for prolonged periods.
Said devices use a fraction of a Watt or just a few Watts of electricity when running. A battery-electric car would need to receive 50-150 shp worth of charging power over the induction link. As the Tesla Model 42 zooms by, people on the sidewalks would be "rolling on the floor" in head-splitting pain, while those with pacemakers just die.
Electric railways are 115 years old and they have never been induction-fed. Induction motors yes, squirrel caged, fully enclosed, but not over-the-air power supply. Their electricity comes from physical contact between the pantograph's current collector strips and the copper catenary wire (or third rail contact shoes in arch-conservative nations like England). Even though catenary system is complicated and has wave-dynamic control problems on high-speed railways, they cannot be avoided.
Of course it's faster, because with inductive charging systems you can build it in such a way that it can use a 13.2kV primary coil without putting anyone at immediate risk of electrocution.
The limiting factor in plug-in systems is the 240V supply rail, which is limited to a 30A circuit breaker (240V * 30A = 7200W). If you pipe in a higher voltage primary to a plug-and-socket, then you introduce issues of arc flashing and electrocution. However, if the primary high voltage coil is safely isolated and couples magnetically to a secondary, high current coil, then you can transfer much more energy.
So, let's say we use 7200V (typical underground MV circuit for neighborhood distribution) for the primary instead of 240V, and say 360V for the secondary (20:1 turns ratio). If our 7200V circuit is on a 10A breaker, then we have 72kW available. The primary coil is safely isolated in a panel on the floor under the car, and the secondary coil is inside the car itself. Piece of cake.
This is far from revolutionary. It's simple electromagnetics.
Often I want something and when I get it, I realize I didn't really want it after all. I think wireless charging falls into that category.
The reality is that electric vehicle owners equip the place they park their car overnight with a high capacity electrical circuit. It takes less than 30 seconds to plug in the car after you park.
Doubtless a wireless charging solution could be made safe and effective, but it would cost more. We don't need to find ways to make electric vehicles more costly.
Greed is the root of all evil.
When taking long trips, we typically stop at places for bathroom/coffee breaks whose main income comes from selling gas. What will happen to these places if cars charge off the road as they drive?
If they design an RV that charges as it drives down the road, and has autonomous driving, I would be tempted to sell my house and live in the RV while driving the local interstates. The RV could drop me off at work in the mornings, then take the kids to school. It could drive to the next state and back waiting until it is time to pick us up. I could tell it to find a traffic jam so that I could fix dinner while the RV is not moving, then its down the road until time to return the next day.
Wow, just wow. I can see it now. people get home, charge, and pop goes your power grid.
I imagine that the big ol' tariff book the US has is about to have a few more pages added....
This is awesome news, but there is a threat here:
I'm fairly certain, that future technology will not allow anonymous charging. It could, but it will not — for the same gratuitous reasons you can't use and recharge a toll-paying transponder anonymously (the way you could use a phone-calling card, for example), but must associate it with both yourself and your car. (Well, New Hampshire, sort of, makes it possible to avoid providing your name, but the cars must still be listed in advance.)
And it is increasingly impossible to drive in certain places without such a transponder, which is, of course, routinely used for surveillance.
As happened with electronic toll-paying, the on-the-road charging too will go from optional to mandatory. Manufacturers will reduce the battery-sizes in many models to save weight and space — and how much of a charge do you need to get from the powered highway to your home (over unpowered streets), right? Effective tracking of your car will become possible. Worse, it may also become possible to remotely disable your car by revoking your access to these chargers.
Today's concerns over license-plate readers may then appear naively quaint...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It would save having to put in seat warmers for the winter.
It only appears faster because it's stealing my SUPERIOR FREE MARKET GENERATED electricity at gunpoint.
--
roman_mir
I'm avoiding electric cars ... but not because they charge slow.
I'm avoiding them because of cost and distance limits.
Another non-problem solved by tax funded research.
And yet none have been able to identify the powered devices in double blind studies.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'