Wireless Electricity Transfer
 

For the Nikola Tesla fans on here , who thinks that the future is going to be wireless electricity?

One corporation that I found within 5 minutes of googling is WiTricity they seem to be having pretty good progress with the technology and over distances of a couple meters to a few centimeters , FOR MEMORY NOT EXACT SOURCE INFORMATION , with an efficiency of 40-95% and higher depending on the distance.

The efficiency doesnt seem far off , to where I think soon they will be able to have only a handful of towers to supply energy at good efficiency.

I would love to see electric cars with no batteries , whether the energy is coming from a tower miles away or every few meters coils set up somehow along the roads to power cars.

Almost limitless power , huge power to weight ratio , and amazing efficiency without ever having to refuel , recharge , or replace any energy into the vehicle. I know this is far off but electric cars with 500-2000lbs less of bodyweight and instant power sounds great.

how can you call %40 efficiency amazing?!?

Wireless power will never happen in cars. Blasting energy out in all directions is extremely inefficient. There are already plenty of people that complain about alleged health risks associated with high power electric lines; no way will those hippies allow the air to be filled with energy.

I can see no way of getting around carrying a store of energy, whether that is a battery or other combustible fuel.

Yeah, it's called a transformer :-)

winfield, i like the enthusiasm but not sure the efficiencies are high enough and distances practical enough for the technology to take off.
Nikola tesla had these ideas i guess 60 or more years ago, there is probably a reason they haven't yet taken off.

For light weight electric cars some more workable ideas have been floated such as near feel transformers at traffic lights and a much more likely one of swapping out batteries at service stations so you get a full charged battery so you only have to carry around battery weight for say 100miles worth of a driving.

Weight is not the enemy of the long traveler. Wind resistance is. For the short traveler, weight is an enemy, but then it doesn't matter because you aren't going very far. Carrying an energy store is practical, and I see no technology replacing it within my lifetime.

I heard there was no way to bill all the users, that's why they didn't use it.

It also means more high-powered EM (Electro-Magnetic) waves going around.
We've already got plenty of that, and the long term effect on people is still not fully understood.

...E-fields or M-fields, which are, respectively, electrostatic or electromagnetic energy transfer methods.

speaking of half-bakery

one thing that did come to mind was a 2d array of coils in the road, and a big permanent magnet on the underside of the nose of the "car" and some big arse coil controller that can sense the cars position, and the car tells the controller where it want to go with a low power wireless signal. The controller then turns on the right sequence of coils to take you there...

The controller can probably accommodate accounting too :)

I have thought about this before and they do have wireless electricity out there are the charge pads and before those were out I read a review on a wireless mouse with no battery the mouse pad supplied the power and could even send it with a thick math book on top of the pad.

Nikola Tesla supposedly had a car that was powered by attenuating an antenna to the resonance frequency of Earths magnetic fields and converting that to usable power. The bad thing is Tesla never wrote down his work unless he was getting it patented so no help there.

If we are going to try this it would be best to try and use the power that we are dumping into the air from AM/FM radio we know how to tune to that.

FYI, this has sorta been discussed already:

http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...tml#post174648

Yes, the pioneer of electricity knows way more about it than modern professors of the science :thumbup: In fact, Alexander Bell knew more about cell phones than we know today, but sadly he forgot to write that down too. The Write Bros. shortly after learning how to keep a plane in the air for a few seconds, later went on to invent a perpetual flying machine, but again they failed to document how it works. It's really a shame that all the brilliant people are now dead.

On the subject of lunatic ideas, I propose a car that harnesses the power of hamsters. They really like to run in those exercise wheels, so why not power a car with that energy? We could pull the engine and replace it with 100 hamsters. 100 horsepower... no, even better, 100 hamsterpower!

Yeah, as I said before, it's just a transformer :-) The problem is this little thing called the inverse square law, which means the amount of power you can capture falls dramatically the further you get from the source. Look at broadcast radio: major stations would put out 50 thousand watts at the transmitting antenna, while your radio set would get millionths of a watt and amplify it.

I thought i would just add this link
HowStuffWorks "How Wireless Power Works"

misleading statement in that link
"Since then, researchers have developed several techniques for moving electricity over long distances without wires. Some exist only as theories or prototypes, but others are already in use. If you have an electric toothbrush, for example, you probably take advantage of one method every day."


the toothbrush holder is in very close proximity to the toothbrush when charging, and when they are close it is exactly a transformer.

I call 40% efficient because of the point in time we are in , and that 40% was the minimum they got from meters of distance from there tests...

Blastings it out in all directions? No , the devices can be setup to only give off energy when needed and based on the specific vehicle.

In my post I did say now or within the near future they could deal with devices or coils every couple of meters. So if the technology did not advance enough to be usable for cars with towers than that would work giving you a 60-70% efficiency without the need for gas transport to gas stations , without the need of gas stations taking up space , without the need of traffic caused from people stopping to need to refuel , without the hassle of needing to stop to refuel , while having the maintenance of an electric car without the need to battery life.

Would be a huge improvement , also the speed limits could be limited to within 5 mph of the speed limit through the current that the devices are emit per vehicle.

60-70% seems to me like a reasonable % of efficiency based on the technologys advancements at the moment , batterys themselves are what a maximum of 90%.

I may be getting a bit over enthused about this , but I still think if the government would go for it , with technology how it already is it could definitely work WAY better than anything the government has plans for.

Another plus , more passenger and trunk space.

...bingo!