Forget wireless power for phones - Korea's doing it for BUSES
From July, two electric buses will travel back and forth along the 24km road from Gumi station, but they won't need to recharge as induction loops along the route will top up the battery as they roll. The technology is coming from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and is little more than an extensive field …
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Re: another pipe dream
From those wind generators that are being rejected.
Oops.
And the point is?
Main problem with electric vehicles at the moment seems to be the need for charging points for batteries every 100 miles or so:-
www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/14/elon_musk_apologized_tesla_s/
So instead, we go for a system that requires induction points every few yards?
- Inefficient charging.
- Miles of roads ripped up (again)
- High-cost metal loops put into the roads.
- Knock-on effects of huge inductive loops on car radios, satellite equipment, and everything else you get in a moving box of metal controlled by electronics when you induce a huge current in it.
- "free" electricity (so someone, somewhere pays for you to charge your car, and assumes you'll ONLY charge your car on it).
- Differing standards / compatibility already.
- And, at the end of the day, no worse than having a free plug-in point where you park and at home (or for buses, at the DAMN BUS STOP!). In fact, that makes infinitely more sense to do that than to have this junk underneath the road.
I love the way we talk about just ripping up miles of road, slapping in some humongous, inefficient inductive coils into both the bus and road (yeah, because nobody would steal metal while it's got power running through it, right?!) and it all just working better than plugging the bus in for an hour at the beginning / end of a journey instead.
How would it work on motorways? At 70mph, I would be "in range" of a 30m inductive coil for less than a second. To get an hour's worth of inductive charging I would have to drive over 108km of coils with no gaps. Not only is that a HUGE amount of metal, that's a huge amount of digging up the roads, and a very unusual driving pattern. Multiply it up by lots and lots of cars, lane, buses, and everything else and it's a stupendous waste of resources to do what a battery and a plug socket can do.
Even assuming that plugging it in is only twice as efficient as inducing the same current, I could get the same power in 30 mins of being parked (and even buses spend more time parked, over a day, than they do moving). I think an extra electric bus taking it in turns to park for 30mins or go for a 30mins circuit of the route is going to be cheaper than ripping up even 1km of roads. Take into account peak periods (more expensive electric) and system-gaming (drive car along road, take it home, swap battery - or use car to power something - drive car back along road whenever you run out of juice, hey presto free electricity without even having to modify the car or charging systems).
I've heard some utterly ridiculous ideas, but induction charging vehicles by in-road chargers? Please. If you want to do that, just save the effort and change the roads for mag-lev tracks and have done with it. More efficient, same power source, same number of changes required to vehicles and much, much, much less electricity wasted inducing currents in passing trucks full of metal.
Motorways
"How would it work on motorways? At 70mph, I would be "in range" of a 30m inductive coil for less than a second"
Unless it's the M25 at peak times, where it can take 10-15 minutes to go over that 30m section of road, so all the time you are effectively stationary, but still using power (radio, air con etc..) you wouldn't be using the (or at least, much of the) charge from your batteries.
Really Lee D?
Of course it's entirely possible that cars could be made out of something other than metal.
One problem hopefully solved
This sounds like a good idea getting past the battery issue of current electric cars. However there is an excessive drive to reduce our energy consumption and worse we have replaced energy generating power stations with wind farms and solar panels. The push for less co2 destroys any hope of rolling out this technology very far.
Considering how great the last gov was at securing our energy supply could we trust them to deploy this technology and deploy the required energy sources regardless of the nutters?
Re: One problem hopefully solved
Excessive drive to reduce energy consumption?? What? Reducing energy consumption is something we should all be wanting to do every day - as it then costs us less. Regardless of the environmental arguments.
How can a drive to reduce consumption be excessive?
Re: One problem hopefully solved
"How can a drive to reduce consumption be excessive?"
When the reduction is enforced and reduces the quality of life.
Re: One problem hopefully solved
As Mr. Orwell so rightly pointed out in 1984:
"...and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was all part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week."
Of course, the real reason the power was cut off was precisely to reduce the quality of life; part of the underlying principle that power is asserted by making people suffer.
If they electrify the M25...
just do the left hand lane, maybe then it would keep Audi, Merc and BMW drivers over to the left, rather than hogging the outside lane(s).
Graphene
I bet graphene has a role to play here. Mix it into the tar and lay a road that generates the required field when a current is applied?
Didn't Oxford do something like this?
Years ago, they put some buses on a limited route with a charging point at the railway station. Those buses I think used a big flywheel to store the power, which was spun up by induction while it waited at the stop.
To me, the bus application is a realistic use of something like this: the stops are fairly predictable and at the ends of the route are often a couple of minutes idle time to spend charging. Add in the fact that bus engines are not the cleanest things on the road, and that electric drive gives you the sort of low speed acceleration that works well on a bus, and you're sorted.
HGV's could probably get some use from this sort of thing, although it would be simple just to plug them in at service stations while the drivers take their requisite tacho breaks...
If we could remove stinky diesel engines from public transport and freight that would cut a big chunk of the pollution and emissions problems, even if the cars all stick to internal comustion engines...
Shriek! Wail!
If you thought the fuss over powerline cancer and cellphone cancer was bad ....
I was thinking overhead then Scaletrix
Overhead needs a return which is why railways work so well. But slot cars - sounds good to me.
I used to have a slot bus and slot lorry - Minic
wouldn't there also be an increased drag imposed on the vehicle as a result of the induction based charging
Will nobody suggest the hybri scalextric option?
Looks forward to the crossover section!!
Re: Will nobody suggest the hybri scalextric option?
I envisage a full size version of the Race 'N' Chase I never got as a kid.
Can't wait for the tipping bridge/jump section. :-D
One day we'll wake up
To find someone's nicked the M25 for copper.
Thank god I live in the US where we are leaders in high speed trains, alt energy, mass transit and electric vehicles!
Oh wait... never mind.
Lateral thinking
We could either continue our search for solutions using the expensive technological options at our disposal, or take advantage of Nature's head start provided by many millions of years of variation and natural selection. What I am suggesting is that we look to nature for some kind of biological transport mechanism - one that has evolved over time to do the very thing that we require. One with sufficiently predictable behaviour, that is able to be programmed for the desired task. One that consumes renewable resources, and produced bio-degradable waste products. Perhaps several units that fit this description could be harnessed together, to provide an engine that can be attached to some kind of carriage unit.
I realise that this is a radical proposal, and has obviously never been tried before, but I believe that it could work. I suggest that we start with limited trials. Naturally public safety is a primary concern, and therefore I suggest that a suitable attired safety officer could walk in front of these experimental vehicles carrying a red flag.
Re: Lateral thinking
The problem with your suggestion is that if we did use said "biological transport mechanism", we'd all be up to our necks in "bio-degradable waste products"!
Bus stops?
I'm surprised that the obvious seems to have been missed. Busses spend a lot of time stopped at predefined locations - bus stops. Put the induction chargers at the stops (only). Give the busses some sort of secure-ID so that the charging turns on only when there's a bus at the stop. Installation cost greatly reduced, freeloader problem greatly recuced. Add yellow lines and discharge monitoring and cameras for further defense against freeloaders.
Bratislava in Slovakia still has the electric trolley buses so they are still in use in other places of the world. Unfortunately in the UK we ripped up most of our tram and trolley bus infrastructure when we thought the car was going to be the bees knees and no one would need public transport anymore
This is hardly new technology or application - Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) has been around for years and keeps getting a prod every 5 years or so. The company I used to work for installed a light rail system about 10 years ago for a tourist spot. The gear was amazingly expensive, was expensive to install and does emit a reasonable amount of RF which can cause more than a few issues if you need to use any other sort of cellular or HF device... It did work though, and for the short length of rail was a good choice of technology.
The cost benefit ratio for regular roading (with all the logistical issues of getting high voltage power along miles and miles of roads) is not going to ever make this a viable option. I think a good example of this are the IPT "Cateye" reflectors (Centre line delineators) which use a radio based IPT system. Despite being a viable and very neat product they are still not popular due to the cost of installing and maintaining the system in the harsh roading environment. They are a specialty device used for specialty applications where a cost benefit can be proven (like tunnels or motorways).
That being said, I still think the original concepts of IPT / near field charging systems were brilliant for smart phones - less tangle on my desk..
"Pantograph"
It is indeed a wonderful word, and refers to a device used to create a drawing by tracing another drawing.
It's used occasionally and *fancifully* for the gizmos on top of electric streetcars, because of the gizmo's slight resemblance to an actual pantograph.
Re: "Pantograph"
You know I always thought that it was either a measuring device for christmas entertainments, or a way of sorting semi nude piccys on the web
Backups and bank cards...
Hopefully, all the banks will have changed to chip-and-pin before this is deployed.
The popularity of tape for transfers to off-site backup might suffer.
More lateral thinking - generating electricity
I always wondered about doing this in reverse - use the movement of vehicles over induction loops in the road to generate electricity.
Nor sure about the practicalities of this, no doubt some brighter spark (*ahem*) than me can point out the many and obvious flaws in this cunning plan.
Let the train take the strain - best of both worlds.
Why not put the charging loops into car carrying carriages on trains? Then you would be able to drive onto a train in your limited range EV and drive off at the other end with a fully charged battery. HS2 would start to make sense then.
Pantographs
"pantographs (a wonderful word, referring to the sprung connector usually seen atop a tram or train that collects power from an overhead cantenary wire) "
No, it collects power from the contact wire. The contact wire is suspended from the catenary by means of droppers. A catenary is the shape of a chain with finite mass suspended between two points. For obvious reasons the contact wire needs to be as flat as possible although it zig-zags from side to side to avoid wearing a groove in the carbon contact strip on the pantograph.
Stupid! Inefficient!
As any power engineer will tell you.
It is only lightweight electronics guys who think differently.
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