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GM Partners With Boston Startup WiTricity To Develop Wireless Charging Technology (electrek.co)
Earlier this week, General Motors announced a partnership with Boston-area startup WiTricity to develop wireless charging pads for electric vehicles. Their goal is to develop a wireless "charging pad" that can be installed beneath a layer of concrete or other garage flooring material so that cars would simply need to be parked over the pad to automatically start charging. Electrek reports: "The electric vehicle has been recognized as central to the future of mobility, and GM has been a leader, making EVs accessible to the broader market. The convenience of wireless charging will help accelerate adoption even further," said Alex Gruzen, CEO of WiTricity, about the alliance. "Wireless charging for EVs, based on industry standards, is inevitable as we move toward a future of self-driving and autonomous vehicles, and this project brings us one step closer to realizing our vision of a world powered wirelessly." GM agreed to allow WiTricity to conduct tests on a Chevrolet Volt hybrid vehicle, "to show how well it would work integrated into a real car," according to Gruzen. Witricity claims that their system can achieve over 90% efficiency, which would make it at least as efficient as a plug-in charger. "Wireless charging is a technology that our customers have told us they are interested in," GM's executive chief engineer of electrified vehicles, Pamela Fletcher, said. "By testing the WiTricity prototype system, we can ensure that wireless charging systems will comply with proposed industry standards, which benefits the entire industry and consumers." The company has high hopes for their product. Gruzen envisions a future in which EV owners can send autonomous cars to charging stations remotely, a future that would only be possible with wireless charging stations.
If we as a civilization have figured out how to dock spacecraft, and refuel planes in flight, surely we can figure out how to connect an autonomous car to a contact charger. It could be a port at bumper height and the car drives very slowly into it. It could be simple robots at the station itself. I'm not saying wireless charging doesn't have its place, but it is not a requirement for an autonomous vehicle infrastructure.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
"Wireless charging is a technology that our customers have told us they are interested in",
our customers also want flying cars.
227-3517
wireless charging is a waste ofenergy how long does it take to plug something in
And wasting energy is particularly bad when we have climate deniers in charge of the govt
Wireless or inductive charging can be as efficient as charging via cable but there are also allot of gotchas as well. One of those gotchas is a fundament law of physics which simply states that if you want efficiency you must couple the magnet field of the charging coil with the receiving coil and the greater the air gap the less efficient the charging will be. Anyone who has done transformer design should know that.
Charging mats for your mobile are not that efficient but they are convenient and the loss in monetary terms is small so most people won't care, but if you upscale inductive charging to a car the losses are going to be much more evident and this translates to extra costs for the consumer which will far outweigh the convenience.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
It's not exactly just the gap that creates inefficient coupling but the ratio of the area of the field to the gap. Therefore on a car where the field is coupled across nearly the whole width the gap can be somewhat large compared to a phone and still not be too bad.
There are other gotchas though such as what if stray pieces of conductive material get in the way? If the vehicle is going to actually charge at a reasonable rate then some stray piece of metal can be a real problem in terms of picking up energy and heating. You could carefully monitor the power on both sides but it's hard to say if the difference is going to heat something. Another is broadcasting all kinds of errant emissions. When you broadcast that much power even little screwups like not parking in the exact right spot or minor damage to the bottom of the car could create tons of unwanted noise at all kinds of frequencies.
While it sounds cool to wirelessly charge, in reality it's likely to be far more practical and inexpensive to just use a plug.
They claim a few meters of cable and a plug are only 90% efficient. ("which would make it at least as efficient as a plug-in charger")
If that were true, charging at 20 kW would result in red-hot cables. So this claim is bullshit.
Gruzen envisions a future in which EV owners can send autonomous cars to charging stations remotely, a future that would only be possible with wireless charging stations.
Uhhhh... no. With the state of computer vision (used by autonomous cars of all things), you can easily program a device to automatically align and plug in a cable. Wireless is just a drop in efficiency. Right now, with the state of battery storage and the goal of ostensibly reducing emissions, you would think efficiency would be engineering goal #1.
Silence is a state of mime.
If you want to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs.
The biggest concern about EVs is the limited range and the need to constantly charge them.
Having cheap, wireless chargers that can be embedded into concrete means that drivers can constantly keep their vehicles charged - whether it's in the city in parking spots, at home or on trips where they should be getting out and walking around every 1.5 to 3 hours (100 to 200 miles) for their health. Every time they stop, their cars are being charged/topped up so they never have to worry about running out of charge.
If cities put in wireless chargers in street parking spots, they can provide a service that EV owners would be willing to pay for (and I imagine that the link/payment would be automatic and keyed to the car's license so it's convenient for the owners).
If businesses put in wireless chargers into their parking lots, then they have an additional source of revenue as well as a reason for EV owners to come directly to them.
As many people have noted, wireless charging isn't as efficient as a direct connection and there will be huge infrastructure costs to install the chargers, power to them and network connections as well as add them to existing EVs as well as design them into future vehicles, but there seems to be a pretty strong business case that will make this type of technology very desirable in the near future.
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