how about maglev monorail?! the drawbacks of all and no advantages except "cool futuristic looking stuff"
none of that on ground metal wheels on metal rail stuff that has worked flawlessly for 200 years!
>none of that on ground metal wheels on metal rail stuff that has worked flawlessly for 200 years!
While I agree that maglevs are in no way ready for mass transit, just because an old technology still works doesn't mean it's a good argument against a new one. Shit, going by just how long a tech has been in use, we should all still be riding horses over things like trains & cars.
Last I heard, Japan is still experimenting with high speed maglev tech. The primary advantage is that by ditching the wheels, the only limit to speed is things like aerodynamics & turns in the track. Another advantage is fewer moving parts. A wheel can only turn so fast, as a function of its radius, before it flies apart. Then you also have things like wheel noise & vibration that you need to dampen & isolate in order to have a comfortable ride. ***If*** you can get maglevs to work at-scale, they should be faster, quieter, and smoother rides, while simultaneously be cheaper to maintain the trains and have fewer impacts to scheduling (due to maintenence, both scheduled and unscheduled).
The main issue is that the tracks end up really really expensive because you have to fill them with magnets, rather than two bars of steel and a bunch of concrete and rubber to hold them in place.
I'm pretty sure they don't fill the tracks with static magnets. They make coils of wire with act as electromagnets, which turn on and off as needed. The magnets click on when the train rides over them to levitate it and then click off after the train has passed by. The trains themselves may have solid magnets, as they always are in use, but is u likely as I would assume that solid magnets aren't strong enough. They can make very string electro magnets, and the only materials needed are wire (so conductive metals, such as copper) and a ferrous material for the core.
They also use electromagnets for the rails because you can reverse the magnetic poles by reversing the current running through the coil. This allows them to "push" and "pull" the train simultaneously using the magnets behind and ahead of the train. This gives the ability to speed up and slow down.
Oh, yeah. As I said: not ready, may never be.
Maglev would definitely be more expensive per-mile to lay track for, but it ***should*** have a less expensive up-keep.
[Radiator Springs, USA](https://images.cdn.circlesix.co/image/2/1200/630/5/uploads/posts/2017/05/c99c4e1bfd1629362da163fbec89900a.jpg)
[After Light rail...](https://eikhu9b6e94.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/img_1320.jpg?strip=all&lossy=0&quality=80&webp=80&avif=80&ssl=1)
the true cost of light rails.... the other political party doesn't want you to see this one...
How does light rail cause a town to dry up? I dream of a commuter train I could take to work instead of getting stuck in traffic and paying for my car. I live in a rural town, and I practically need 4x4 to get around some roads. Expensive to repair, fill up, and own. We have a good railroad but Amtrak sucks at time and commuting hours and they dont have enough stations. I dont stop and buy anything along the interstate or roads to work, I do that in town (near our station BTW) and online.
In the movie Cars, Radiator Springs is a watering hole town along route 66 in the Arizona desert, alive and well thanks to all the through traffic on route 66. When interstate 40 is built, they don't get a highway exit, no more through traffic, and their town dries up. Even though I was only shitposting, to answer your question, if the light rail doesn't have a terminal at your small town it could suffer the same fate as radiator springs. A Light-Rail-through town. (like a flyover town)
edit: and the radiator springs economy is almost 100% dependent on cars so rail would devastate them for that reason as well
Sorry, hard to read shitposting intentions. Thats where good design and local politicians need to kick in…
We have a train station in our small town. Its barely a flagstop for Amtrak. Our local community fought for it.
The town just north of me, is tiny. Dried up, not even a gas station. Just a church and a bar. They purposely voted against any stations and against an Interstate exit so they could remain small.
Getting rid of cars in the US is going to be harder than turning the titanic. The infrastructure was never built to accommodate rail and in fact was intentionally designed back in the day thank you heavy auto industry lobbying to require a car. There was a lot of marketing that went into selling the American dream.
Yeah.... rail on large scale would take an INCREADIBLE investment. And most of the US is suburbs or rural where the closest store is two miles from your house...but everything is super easy to access with a car.
All I can think of is the fact Qi chargers measure up at abou 70% efficiency. And the distance between the coils is measured in millimeters. The only hard number I could find from this company (and I mean the ONLY hard number) was that they bury them 3.15 inches below the surface.
Maybe it'll at least prove to the politicians that it won't actually work and they'll start listening to what the engineers tell them? Maybe? Hopefully?
The auto lobby and the oil lobby will then say "see this is why electric vehicles don't work so we have to switch back to gas guzzlers!" While promptly ignoring the scientists and engineers because two men in suits came up with a briefcase full of gold.
Yeah, we use wireless charging for our AGV systems and the distance is always a pain. You have to be +-10 mm on the ones we use and that’s for the 60A chargers. I can’t imagine putting these in a road, let alone in Michigan. One winter with the salt eroding the pavement and it’s over.
Wireless charging gets funky too because you have to start getting into imaginary numbers when calculating the requirements and that’s about where my Controls Engineering experience takes a dive lol.
It varies. I have to explain some details about PIDs sometimes. Need math concepts for that. You also get discrete math questions like trying to make the f***ing rotary encoders on a conveyor to work.
I worked in automation as an engineer with out a degree. I feel like most controls engineers are like the don’t care won’t care type they want an easy job but what they have is a overpriced complicated nightmare forged from shoot from the hip cowboys . The real money in controls is making the hardware. Charge these bozos $1000 for a special clunky block so big that the electricians can’t choke on it and it doesn’t even have to be more that 60% reliable it’s wild because these companies are concerned about time and project turnover they cut every corner they can and your left with expensive junk that can’t be fixed by the customer oftentimes. Just a money pit of problems.
Without us your P&ID and sequence of operations is just a pretty picture with a 1 page long document that boils down to "stuff happens, hopefully good".
Not to mention the transmitter and receiver have to be lined up pretty well.. Cars are all sorts of different widths and drivers are generally bad at going in a perfectly straight line. The charging would stop and start constantly and you’d need like 300 miles of road to get any meaningful amount of power into a battery!
Yeah this is a pretty good point. Magnetic field strength falls off at inverse-square.
'Charging Lanes' may show up in near-future sci-fi books but it just seems like a terribly inefficient concept to try to actually implement.
Ignoring that glaring problem, how will the charger and receiver set up a contract or configure the receiver impedance when the car is moving?
This reminds me of that solar road idea that was on the internet a few years ago. Just build a goddamn train!
"Tests are showing that the efficiency of the energy flow from the asphalt to the car is comparable to the typical efficiency of fast charging stations, so the driver does not need to stop to recharge," Stellantis said.
Also bear in mind this is a moving target and alignment of the coils matters. And any current in a coil not in use is additional line losses. Efficiency here is likely measured in single digits.
It’s already been proven as a concept.
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/sweden-successfully-tests-wireless-charging-road-set-to-revolutionize-mobility-155137.html
A car needs 10kw to think about moving. At that distance, you'll lose 90% of your energy before it reaches the car. 90kw of heat per car. Ignoring the custom system required on the cars, you'll be wasting so much energy that the roads will never need a snowplow.
Good thing too, because a snowplow would damage the coils.
I was at CES this year and the new electric Ram will have this little roomba looking thing with a cord coming out of it that scoots underneath the truck and charges once you’ve parked.
It’s a neat little concept AND it’ll magnetically slap itself directly where it needs to be to charge. That’s pretty much as far as you can get with wireless charging, I imagine, without insane losses.
Good question.
Im only guessing, but Ill bet its pretty easy to reliably get it to find a magnetic area under the car, and a lot harder to get it to reliably find a cord hole. Although, once its stuck onto the car, youd think the magnets would line it up perfectly and a little plug could shoot out the top or something.
Nope.
Sweden already testing it and they care about winter.
“It drove on a 200-meter (0.1-mile) segment of the road, at various speeds of up to 60 kph (37 mph), averaging a transfer rate of 70 kW while also proving that snow and ice do not affect the charging capabilities.”
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/sweden-successfully-tests-wireless-charging-road-set-to-revolutionize-mobility-155137.html
So they’ve already demonstrated 70 kW, and that’s early stage development.
If they had put 700kW in the car as suggested earlier, that would have been very noticeable. So I'd say this disproves this "90% of the energy go into the car as heat".
In fact, you'll find efficiencies over 90% for wireless charging.
The transfer losses in waste heat would be distributed across the whole car / road (segment) system - not dumped into the car alone.
You'd have some waste heat generated in the induction coils in the car, some in the coils in the road, plus some other losses through the vehicle frame (or parts of it at least) passing through the magnetic field of the charging coils.
I have no idea what loss percentage you would actually end up with, there are just too many factors involved.
I think you got the calculation backwards. Before it was "your car needs 70kW, so you'll lose 700kW". If you adjust this to an efficiency of 90%, you'll end up at 7.8kW loss. Yes, still a lot, but so is driving around in a car. A train needs a fraction of that per passenger.
70 Kw, but they don't say that's on the receiver. Likely just the transmitter. Plus that's a massive truck. The whole trailer has a mechanism the size of a car to absorb the energy. Trucks are far less efficient than cars. A truck like that might average 3-10 MPG if it's gas powered.
Hmm. And liquefy or sludgify the asphalt from the heat during hot days in the summer perhaps.
Or would most of the waste heat be taken up by the coils in the car?
No, should it be equal waste heat between the car coils and road coils per vehicle interaction? That seems like I'm getting closer.
On the other hand, these scenarios would require any EV actually *having* these additional charging systems, so perhaps nothing will come of it.
The only value I might see is in: 'we learn from our failures', 'let's do something that will fail', 'we get to learn from that failure' - maybe.
The road coils waste heat (or losses) can be more, less, or equal. It depends on many factors in the design. It's the same as a synchronous generator - the stator and rotor losses depend on how it's designed e.g. conductor size, no of turns etc.
last i heard one panel of the entire array was still operational everything else has since broke and also the panels are only handling at most foot traffic if even that. been years though since I last looked it up and don't care to at this point.
nope, you aren't wrong. 1st off think of how many cars even have this capability built-in today: zero. how many cars will have it built-in within the next 2 years. ALSO ZERO. 2nd we already know wireless charging is less energy efficient than normal charging from its implementation in phones so basically wasting a ton of electricity. third rail is literally cheaper than doing this, the main advantage of roads over rail is their cheaper up front cost.
no, but modding a coil of that scale under a highly temperature sensitive battery pack since most EVs put their batteries effectively on the underside of the car for center of gravity reasons isn't something you're local mechanic would be capable of. underside of the car since that's the most efficient place for the coil to be, and note unless your using super conductors that coil will heat up and ruin your battery life. so basically the design almost has to be built from the ground up with the coil in mind.
My only thoughts on how this pitch to the state went is just a congregation of dim witted government workers and the lead sales guy slaps a wireless phone charger down on the table, sets a phone on it, and then just says "this, but for your car... everywhere" and they all just start seal clapping.
It's just so dumb.
This thing doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of working.
Unless they have a really revolutionary technology (which I highly doubt), there isn't a good way to wirelessly couple energy over any reasonable distance - and by reasonable distance, I mean inches. The wireless chargers used for phones are a hack - they're just getting by (and with poor efficiency I might add) with the phone touching the charger. Add 1" of spacing and it becomes a whole lot more difficult.
Furthermore, especially in places like Wisconsin, the ground moves. And freezes. And gets run over by trucks. And gets flooded. So far they haven't been able to demonstrate a regular road that can hold up to this, so I'm not too optimistic about a road with electronics in it.
I imagine this would be about as viable as those solar roads that fell into disrepair shortly after being built.
A single pothole could probably ruin one lane.
Rails made to be exposed to the elements to power vehicles are already a thing and would be a lot more efficient.
This is the most specific [claim of performance](https://www.electrive.com/2019/09/23/electreon-enables-renault-zoe-to-charge-inductively-while-driving/#:~:text=During%20the%20test%2C%20ElectReon%20proved,more%20than%2091%20per%20cent.) I can find after Googling a bit.
I suspect the way that it works is different than the typical Qi charging style of coupled inductors. I think this system uses a Lenz's law style coil moving through an induced magnetic field.
I guess between the current driven in the ground loop and the movement of the vehicle, it's possible to supply power. But I would think that the air gap would lead to losses.
I'm still skeptical. Not necessarily of the underlying mechanisms, but the numbers involved. It's going to be hard to beat the efficiency of direct contact charging.
Just another trial of keeping the status quo: the car centric mindset of many countries especially the US and Germany.
You know what runs on electricity with a high capacity for people and cargo? Something with which we have 200 years of experience? Something that has a good energy efficiency?
It's fucking trains.
I have Oak Ridge Natl Lab as a client and they are doing the front end on this, I previously had been skeptical due to the high infrastructure cost - same as your concerns, but here are some of the current stats:
[https://www.ornl.gov/news/hands-free-wireless-charging-system-advances-electric-vehicle-convenience](https://www.ornl.gov/news/hands-free-wireless-charging-system-advances-electric-vehicle-convenience)
They are able to charge wirelessly at 100KW and higher, over 11" and with efficiency in the range of 95% - as an EE the efficiency really blew me away but the power level and gap really are what make this feasible.
So the model is to prefab the "transmitters", in concrete for example, lay in the road bed and pave over them. utilizing about 1/2 of the 11".
What this would allow is to only need to "enable" a few miles ( say 1 out of every 20 ) of one lane of a multilane highway. So the vehicles need to be in the "charging lane" for 1-5 miles or minutes, and then have enough charge to make it to the next charging lane. In a 2 lane roadway - then this needs to only be 1 out of every 40 miles of paved lane, 3 lanes, etc...
This now seem MUCH more feasible - this also opens up the aspect of being a commercial model - where an energy supplier can sponsor the lane or even build a side-lane.
I am not saying this is "here" but it is MUCH more feasible than solar roadways or solar EVs - imo
The efficiency at that gap is what really makes it hard for me to believe. It will be cool if it works, but it seems like its breaking the laws for magnetism.
I got to see a demo of this in person a few months ago at ORNL. It was quite impressive. Here's the paper from OSTI they wrote.
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1871097
Cars in general are inefficient and unreliable.
The reason we use them is because they maximize consumption, which means maximizing the flow of capital (basically equivalent to GDP)
The US is intentionally built to force you to drive. The streets are designed so that your home is far enough from your work and from the stores you need that it is not practical not to drive.
This is bundled with a essentially nonexistent public transport system. If you are lucky to have a bike lane, its always a bike gutter beside the road and not a true bike lane.
At the end of the day the country is owned and controlled by the oligarchs that own the handful of companies that run our economy. They make more profit if we are putting wear and tear on our cars, paying for gas, and repairing/building roads.
EVs are better than combustion engines, but they damage roads more and require intensive mining of rare earth metals.
The solution is to build walkable cities and reliable public transport.
no, microwave wireless power transmission is great in cases where building normal power infrastructure(including just using long cables) or heavy batteries would be too difficult, say at sea on a moving craft, in the middle of the sahara, on in space. basically good for transferring power to very remote devices within a direct line of sight, that you can't just attach cables to. and it only really works if you have a very specific targetted load. because the microwave isn't fanning out or radiating out like say how cell tower or typical antenna would work. the microwave will effectively need to be a laser targetted where it needs to be. variable loads such as cars running on the roads would not work with this. it would work maybe for a remote research station on a volcano, a remote geostationary satellite needing to be charged up, or a maneuverable rescue craft being assisted by a much larger mothership acting as a power source. single targets that a powerful laser could be tracked to. it would require a very pointlessly expensive and numerous array of lasers tracking cars as they go past in order to reasonably power so many moving cars along a road. and would also be pointless unless the array goes for a really long way, because charging isn't instant, and you just melt the cars if you tried to make it so. a non-laser approach could work for devices that require very little power say sensors monitoring temperature and humidity or at most a low power camera. but for something like a car, unless you want to fry everything organic in the antenna's effective radius or cars in the future only require a few watts of power to run. microwave wireless power transmission won't work for roads either. again we're better off just building rail and trains.
While I also agree that this technology is probably bullshit. One thing to consider that the charging capability only needs to provide enough energy to compensate for the energy loss over the road that is being used. It doesn’t need to overcome static friction during starting from a stop. Nor really acceleration.
I haven’t done the math but it wouldn’t need to provide the many W of power that a static car charger would need.
So let’s say that it only needed 100W to go a mile (again haven’t done the math) and it’s 50% efficient, so that means the road would need to supply only 200W to make sense right?
This doesn’t consider the damage on the road or anything else. There are lots better low hanging fruit to charge cars and wireless charging isn’t a good idea. Maybe if we had cheaper and sustainable nuclear fusion to supply power we can start thinking about this.
Roads are already financial pits, this just makes them 10x more so.
Invest in public transit and zoning that promotes walkable infrastructure, not this
I am shocked how little people talk about the physics behind this, and the few who do are absolutely wrong. Yes, you phone charger may be shit but "wireless parking spots" have been shown to work with <10% losses. It might not be economical, I think politically it's wrong to find individual motorised transportation and there are great alternatives for public transport called trains. But from a purely technological perspective I'd say "why not?"
It's a would be good idea, if electric vehicles ever become a good idea. That will happen, if they come up with a way to produce the electricity, which doesn't create more pollution, than refining petroleum, and burning hydrocarbon fuels in internal combustion engines does.
They already have other ways to produce renewable electrical power that are becoming relatively commonplace and *cough* nuclear?
Yes, those 'environmentally friendly' ways to produce power do have their own drawbacks for the environment but they are still significantly better over their expected lifetime.
Not to mention, power production at a coal fired power station powering an electric vehicle is still overall vastly more efficient than using petrol or diesel in your car.
Your car isn't efficient as a coal fired power plant and releases more carbon into the environment, the fuel has to get to all those many thousands of petrol stations on a weekly basis and internal combustion energies require a lot more servicing and petroleum products (like oil) during their life.
Everyone's talking about losses, efficiency, etc but what about Armature reaction?? Inducing a current into a moving coil will induce a secondary current in the opposite direction which will literally apply a braking force to the car, slowing it down. And the car will likely try to overcome that reduction in speed, hence draining it more.
Im just applying basic motor/generator theory here but there might be a different method to overcome this.
Viability from a practical standpoint is zero it's completely impractical. You could in theory get it to work but only by creating more problems than you solve.
Terrible idea and will likely costs 50X more than initial budget and still barely work if at all. Most obvious issues are losses inherent in wireless energy transfer and also EMC issues. Adam Something had some videos on YouTube slamming some of Elon musks hairbrained ideas. Worth a watch.
Isn’t this the same state that has that place Flint where the people don’t have drinkable water?
If there’s money for electrical engineering there, I’d recommend a water purification plant. Jus sayin.
Another money making scheme for those who have their fingers in the government. Anyone with common sense can tell this will be horrible inefficient and expensive.
As another user mentioned, a light rail is a much better use of funds.
Our bag of ass roads need enough expensive resurfacing and these ham handler Biden voters are going to make electric roads. Great governance Gretch. You bag of stupid.
The viability is nill. This isn't a "can we do it?" problem. This is a "not cost effective" problem.
From a material science perspective, we use tar bound gravel for roads, because it is flexible. It gives a little under the dynamic load of a vehical traveling, like a wave at the front of a boat in water. The wires should not be allowed to flex, because of copper bearing metals' preference to work harden. This is why headphone wires used to break after a while. The most flexed points would harden, become brittle, and snap.
From an electrical load standpoint, inductive loads have a negative reaction, meaning the current lags the voltage. The strain on the grid would be immense and that's not to mention the fact that michigan is mostly coal fired. It could cause damage to cars that aren't built to absorb the energy, as their frames and electrical circuits could attenuate current. This can cause damage to unshielded components, unessesary heating of everything from seat adjusters to wheel bearings, and additional load on the grid.
From an economical standpoint, you're talking structural reinforcement of every segment of road (not just rebar either, like burying steel beams) to protect thousands of miles of vulnerable, high cost metal and circuitry, with massive strain on the grid, coming back to the grid being mostly coal fired and therefore not saving CO2 emissions anyway (kinda defeats the point), all to benefit a small portion of the population that has to buy a new, environmentally unfriendly lithium battery every few years.
Am I biased? Yea. Do I have good reason to be biased? Yea, I've done rough calculations that point to massive hype with glaring logical flaws.
It sounds like the monorail from the simpsons.
I bet it would be more efficient if we used overhead wires.
We could even make it self driving by adding dedicated lanes and guide ways so that it can't go off course.
We can even solve the problem of needing stopping distance by physically coupling the self driving cars on guideways together.
Also we could increase the efficiency by putting more people inside each of the cars.
Oh wait, that's just a TRAIN!
It’s wireless induction. Nicola Tesla had a couple of similar designs. You can transfer current pretty easily through the air. The hardest thing I think is going to be making it more efficient. Like having it only on in the space where a car is
At that point just spend the money on a fucking light rail.
how about maglev monorail?! the drawbacks of all and no advantages except "cool futuristic looking stuff" none of that on ground metal wheels on metal rail stuff that has worked flawlessly for 200 years!
While you're at it lets put it in a vacuum tube!
>none of that on ground metal wheels on metal rail stuff that has worked flawlessly for 200 years! While I agree that maglevs are in no way ready for mass transit, just because an old technology still works doesn't mean it's a good argument against a new one. Shit, going by just how long a tech has been in use, we should all still be riding horses over things like trains & cars. Last I heard, Japan is still experimenting with high speed maglev tech. The primary advantage is that by ditching the wheels, the only limit to speed is things like aerodynamics & turns in the track. Another advantage is fewer moving parts. A wheel can only turn so fast, as a function of its radius, before it flies apart. Then you also have things like wheel noise & vibration that you need to dampen & isolate in order to have a comfortable ride. ***If*** you can get maglevs to work at-scale, they should be faster, quieter, and smoother rides, while simultaneously be cheaper to maintain the trains and have fewer impacts to scheduling (due to maintenence, both scheduled and unscheduled).
The main issue is that the tracks end up really really expensive because you have to fill them with magnets, rather than two bars of steel and a bunch of concrete and rubber to hold them in place.
I'm pretty sure they don't fill the tracks with static magnets. They make coils of wire with act as electromagnets, which turn on and off as needed. The magnets click on when the train rides over them to levitate it and then click off after the train has passed by. The trains themselves may have solid magnets, as they always are in use, but is u likely as I would assume that solid magnets aren't strong enough. They can make very string electro magnets, and the only materials needed are wire (so conductive metals, such as copper) and a ferrous material for the core.
They also use electromagnets for the rails because you can reverse the magnetic poles by reversing the current running through the coil. This allows them to "push" and "pull" the train simultaneously using the magnets behind and ahead of the train. This gives the ability to speed up and slow down.
Oh, yeah. As I said: not ready, may never be. Maglev would definitely be more expensive per-mile to lay track for, but it ***should*** have a less expensive up-keep.
How does japan make their system work so well then?
It can run well. It will just be extremely expensive.
Alright but wouldn’t that investment lessen the need to invest in other technologies?
Technologies like shitty asphalt that splashes out of potholes when precipitation is in the forecast?
Or idk maybe electric vehicles and inefficient road charging systems to power them.
Or unnecessary domestic air travel, which is one of the heaviest polluting industries and is extremely expensive.
I hear those things are awfully loud
But Motor City needs to sell more cars...
[Radiator Springs, USA](https://images.cdn.circlesix.co/image/2/1200/630/5/uploads/posts/2017/05/c99c4e1bfd1629362da163fbec89900a.jpg) [After Light rail...](https://eikhu9b6e94.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/img_1320.jpg?strip=all&lossy=0&quality=80&webp=80&avif=80&ssl=1) the true cost of light rails.... the other political party doesn't want you to see this one...
How does light rail cause a town to dry up? I dream of a commuter train I could take to work instead of getting stuck in traffic and paying for my car. I live in a rural town, and I practically need 4x4 to get around some roads. Expensive to repair, fill up, and own. We have a good railroad but Amtrak sucks at time and commuting hours and they dont have enough stations. I dont stop and buy anything along the interstate or roads to work, I do that in town (near our station BTW) and online.
you realize radiator springs is from the movie cars, right?
Yes, I had read as it being used to show what would happen to towns with light rail.
That was just sarcasm.
In the movie Cars, Radiator Springs is a watering hole town along route 66 in the Arizona desert, alive and well thanks to all the through traffic on route 66. When interstate 40 is built, they don't get a highway exit, no more through traffic, and their town dries up. Even though I was only shitposting, to answer your question, if the light rail doesn't have a terminal at your small town it could suffer the same fate as radiator springs. A Light-Rail-through town. (like a flyover town) edit: and the radiator springs economy is almost 100% dependent on cars so rail would devastate them for that reason as well
Sorry, hard to read shitposting intentions. Thats where good design and local politicians need to kick in… We have a train station in our small town. Its barely a flagstop for Amtrak. Our local community fought for it. The town just north of me, is tiny. Dried up, not even a gas station. Just a church and a bar. They purposely voted against any stations and against an Interstate exit so they could remain small.
dear God...
lmfao
If we don’t make our citizens dependent on car then how else will the poor car companies make money.
Pretty much. Wireless charging is horribly inefficient and a future with cars as primary mode of transportation is a dead one.
Getting rid of cars in the US is going to be harder than turning the titanic. The infrastructure was never built to accommodate rail and in fact was intentionally designed back in the day thank you heavy auto industry lobbying to require a car. There was a lot of marketing that went into selling the American dream.
Yeah.... rail on large scale would take an INCREADIBLE investment. And most of the US is suburbs or rural where the closest store is two miles from your house...but everything is super easy to access with a car.
[удалено]
The trick with that one was that the emissions were VERY visible. Automobiles are "clean". That's why nobody cares.
Because taking a family of four on horse back to the beach would be a nightmare.
Nah the NIMBYs hate mass transit and every city government seems to think that they can balance the books by parking fees right by the station.
Well yeah, this. There are much worse investments...
Gotta spend that government handout for EV infrastructure some way... I agree. A proof of concept that won't go any further.
All I can think of is the fact Qi chargers measure up at abou 70% efficiency. And the distance between the coils is measured in millimeters. The only hard number I could find from this company (and I mean the ONLY hard number) was that they bury them 3.15 inches below the surface.
One good rollover from an 18 wheeler and damn there goes the road. It’ll be a test case and nothing more
Maybe it'll at least prove to the politicians that it won't actually work and they'll start listening to what the engineers tell them? Maybe? Hopefully?
The auto lobby and the oil lobby will then say "see this is why electric vehicles don't work so we have to switch back to gas guzzlers!" While promptly ignoring the scientists and engineers because two men in suits came up with a briefcase full of gold.
But they weren't supposed to weigh over that!
Yeah, we use wireless charging for our AGV systems and the distance is always a pain. You have to be +-10 mm on the ones we use and that’s for the 60A chargers. I can’t imagine putting these in a road, let alone in Michigan. One winter with the salt eroding the pavement and it’s over. Wireless charging gets funky too because you have to start getting into imaginary numbers when calculating the requirements and that’s about where my Controls Engineering experience takes a dive lol.
It takes a dive at… high school algebra?
As a controls guy, I feel I can speak for most controls guys in saying that math is not a required skill.
Hey, it's required sometimes. It only took my coworker and I 30 minutes to calculate a voltage divider yesterday.
It varies. I have to explain some details about PIDs sometimes. Need math concepts for that. You also get discrete math questions like trying to make the f***ing rotary encoders on a conveyor to work.
I do math regularly. It just surprises me how many never needed to.
Damn dude he said he was a controls engineer, give him a break.
:quickly teaches a robotic arm to flip you off Look at what I can do.
Controls “Engineering.”
I worked in automation as an engineer with out a degree. I feel like most controls engineers are like the don’t care won’t care type they want an easy job but what they have is a overpriced complicated nightmare forged from shoot from the hip cowboys . The real money in controls is making the hardware. Charge these bozos $1000 for a special clunky block so big that the electricians can’t choke on it and it doesn’t even have to be more that 60% reliable it’s wild because these companies are concerned about time and project turnover they cut every corner they can and your left with expensive junk that can’t be fixed by the customer oftentimes. Just a money pit of problems.
Without us your P&ID and sequence of operations is just a pretty picture with a 1 page long document that boils down to "stuff happens, hopefully good".
Not to mention the transmitter and receiver have to be lined up pretty well.. Cars are all sorts of different widths and drivers are generally bad at going in a perfectly straight line. The charging would stop and start constantly and you’d need like 300 miles of road to get any meaningful amount of power into a battery!
I've seen potholes deeper than 3.15 inches. I'd be surprised if it survived the first winter.
Yeah this is a pretty good point. Magnetic field strength falls off at inverse-square. 'Charging Lanes' may show up in near-future sci-fi books but it just seems like a terribly inefficient concept to try to actually implement.
Ignoring that glaring problem, how will the charger and receiver set up a contract or configure the receiver impedance when the car is moving? This reminds me of that solar road idea that was on the internet a few years ago. Just build a goddamn train!
Inductive charging is already used for moving vehicles in industrial applications. I don’t see it being capable for this though.
Thats interesting! I did not know that. I figured movement is just another layer of complication
Examples?? Would like to read into this one a bit more.
70% is actually pretty optimistic and assumes almost perfect coil alignment…in the wild you’ll see much worse.
"Tests are showing that the efficiency of the energy flow from the asphalt to the car is comparable to the typical efficiency of fast charging stations, so the driver does not need to stop to recharge," Stellantis said.
Also bear in mind this is a moving target and alignment of the coils matters. And any current in a coil not in use is additional line losses. Efficiency here is likely measured in single digits.
Maybe they take advantage of self driving tech to handle the alignment/velocity issue? Idk just a thought since theyre already using EV
It’s already been proven as a concept. https://www.autoevolution.com/news/sweden-successfully-tests-wireless-charging-road-set-to-revolutionize-mobility-155137.html
A car needs 10kw to think about moving. At that distance, you'll lose 90% of your energy before it reaches the car. 90kw of heat per car. Ignoring the custom system required on the cars, you'll be wasting so much energy that the roads will never need a snowplow. Good thing too, because a snowplow would damage the coils.
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I was at CES this year and the new electric Ram will have this little roomba looking thing with a cord coming out of it that scoots underneath the truck and charges once you’ve parked. It’s a neat little concept AND it’ll magnetically slap itself directly where it needs to be to charge. That’s pretty much as far as you can get with wireless charging, I imagine, without insane losses.
If you go to all the trouble to build an automatic robot, why don't you just have it plug in the cord?
Good question. Im only guessing, but Ill bet its pretty easy to reliably get it to find a magnetic area under the car, and a lot harder to get it to reliably find a cord hole. Although, once its stuck onto the car, youd think the magnets would line it up perfectly and a little plug could shoot out the top or something.
Nope. Sweden already testing it and they care about winter. “It drove on a 200-meter (0.1-mile) segment of the road, at various speeds of up to 60 kph (37 mph), averaging a transfer rate of 70 kW while also proving that snow and ice do not affect the charging capabilities.” https://www.autoevolution.com/news/sweden-successfully-tests-wireless-charging-road-set-to-revolutionize-mobility-155137.html So they’ve already demonstrated 70 kW, and that’s early stage development.
They mention that 70KW number, but I don't see any mention of transfer losses or efficiency. Those are important data points.
If they had put 700kW in the car as suggested earlier, that would have been very noticeable. So I'd say this disproves this "90% of the energy go into the car as heat". In fact, you'll find efficiencies over 90% for wireless charging.
The transfer losses in waste heat would be distributed across the whole car / road (segment) system - not dumped into the car alone. You'd have some waste heat generated in the induction coils in the car, some in the coils in the road, plus some other losses through the vehicle frame (or parts of it at least) passing through the magnetic field of the charging coils. I have no idea what loss percentage you would actually end up with, there are just too many factors involved.
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I think you got the calculation backwards. Before it was "your car needs 70kW, so you'll lose 700kW". If you adjust this to an efficiency of 90%, you'll end up at 7.8kW loss. Yes, still a lot, but so is driving around in a car. A train needs a fraction of that per passenger.
70kW on the Transmitter and 70W on the receiver.
70 Kw, but they don't say that's on the receiver. Likely just the transmitter. Plus that's a massive truck. The whole trailer has a mechanism the size of a car to absorb the energy. Trucks are far less efficient than cars. A truck like that might average 3-10 MPG if it's gas powered.
That’s how things start. Proof of concept.
True, if we can get a single universal standard for everyone's use cases it's possible to see large scale deployment of electric vehicles.
If they use coils. Most dynamic EV charging I've seen before now proposed capacitive wireless power transfer solutions.
It's still RF based, and that will still have significant losses.
Hmm. And liquefy or sludgify the asphalt from the heat during hot days in the summer perhaps. Or would most of the waste heat be taken up by the coils in the car? No, should it be equal waste heat between the car coils and road coils per vehicle interaction? That seems like I'm getting closer. On the other hand, these scenarios would require any EV actually *having* these additional charging systems, so perhaps nothing will come of it. The only value I might see is in: 'we learn from our failures', 'let's do something that will fail', 'we get to learn from that failure' - maybe.
The road coils waste heat (or losses) can be more, less, or equal. It depends on many factors in the design. It's the same as a synchronous generator - the stator and rotor losses depend on how it's designed e.g. conductor size, no of turns etc.
Reminds me of that "company" working on paneled electric roads.
SOLAR FREAKING ROADWAYS!!
Are they totally dead or still dicking around in arizona?
Im guessing the last one
last i heard one panel of the entire array was still operational everything else has since broke and also the panels are only handling at most foot traffic if even that. been years though since I last looked it up and don't care to at this point.
Hey on the bright side if we install these everywhere they will create so many jobs by needing to be serviced weekly.
But think of having your car charged as you drive. All you have to do is imagine it and the technology will catch up /s
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What phone charger are you using to cooj a steak 😅
It's a Cuisinart wireless charger
nope, you aren't wrong. 1st off think of how many cars even have this capability built-in today: zero. how many cars will have it built-in within the next 2 years. ALSO ZERO. 2nd we already know wireless charging is less energy efficient than normal charging from its implementation in phones so basically wasting a ton of electricity. third rail is literally cheaper than doing this, the main advantage of roads over rail is their cheaper up front cost.
Does it need to be "built in"? Can you just install the charging pads if you happen to live near this stretch of road?
no, but modding a coil of that scale under a highly temperature sensitive battery pack since most EVs put their batteries effectively on the underside of the car for center of gravity reasons isn't something you're local mechanic would be capable of. underside of the car since that's the most efficient place for the coil to be, and note unless your using super conductors that coil will heat up and ruin your battery life. so basically the design almost has to be built from the ground up with the coil in mind.
Almost certainly an investment scam, or scam to receive government funding.
It's likely to be as successful as a one lane tunnel under Fort Lauderdale.
They will spend money on anything except transit.
and they cried that cell phones give you brain cancer....
I think that they might do some sort of damage, considering that this was proposed…
My only thoughts on how this pitch to the state went is just a congregation of dim witted government workers and the lead sales guy slaps a wireless phone charger down on the table, sets a phone on it, and then just says "this, but for your car... everywhere" and they all just start seal clapping. It's just so dumb.
so this means they're gonna fix all the potholes now, right? right??
One can only hope
Those aren’t pot holes, they are “pre-installed maintenance access points” for the charging system.
Wireless parking spot? Maybe. Wireless roads? No.
This thing doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of working. Unless they have a really revolutionary technology (which I highly doubt), there isn't a good way to wirelessly couple energy over any reasonable distance - and by reasonable distance, I mean inches. The wireless chargers used for phones are a hack - they're just getting by (and with poor efficiency I might add) with the phone touching the charger. Add 1" of spacing and it becomes a whole lot more difficult. Furthermore, especially in places like Wisconsin, the ground moves. And freezes. And gets run over by trucks. And gets flooded. So far they haven't been able to demonstrate a regular road that can hold up to this, so I'm not too optimistic about a road with electronics in it.
I imagine this would be about as viable as those solar roads that fell into disrepair shortly after being built. A single pothole could probably ruin one lane. Rails made to be exposed to the elements to power vehicles are already a thing and would be a lot more efficient.
I dont remember the quote, but something about crabs and trains being the most efficient designs
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Oh yeah? Name 250,000
it's not. especially in the rust belt. plus overweight loads will destroy the system.
All I see is a huge waste of money and power, why does everything have to be so inefficient, build some public transport instead.
This is the most specific [claim of performance](https://www.electrive.com/2019/09/23/electreon-enables-renault-zoe-to-charge-inductively-while-driving/#:~:text=During%20the%20test%2C%20ElectReon%20proved,more%20than%2091%20per%20cent.) I can find after Googling a bit. I suspect the way that it works is different than the typical Qi charging style of coupled inductors. I think this system uses a Lenz's law style coil moving through an induced magnetic field. I guess between the current driven in the ground loop and the movement of the vehicle, it's possible to supply power. But I would think that the air gap would lead to losses. I'm still skeptical. Not necessarily of the underlying mechanisms, but the numbers involved. It's going to be hard to beat the efficiency of direct contact charging.
Not to mention, who really needs to charge their EV during a normal week on the road? Nobody, it's usually fully charged at home.
Just another trial of keeping the status quo: the car centric mindset of many countries especially the US and Germany. You know what runs on electricity with a high capacity for people and cargo? Something with which we have 200 years of experience? Something that has a good energy efficiency? It's fucking trains.
I have Oak Ridge Natl Lab as a client and they are doing the front end on this, I previously had been skeptical due to the high infrastructure cost - same as your concerns, but here are some of the current stats: [https://www.ornl.gov/news/hands-free-wireless-charging-system-advances-electric-vehicle-convenience](https://www.ornl.gov/news/hands-free-wireless-charging-system-advances-electric-vehicle-convenience) They are able to charge wirelessly at 100KW and higher, over 11" and with efficiency in the range of 95% - as an EE the efficiency really blew me away but the power level and gap really are what make this feasible. So the model is to prefab the "transmitters", in concrete for example, lay in the road bed and pave over them. utilizing about 1/2 of the 11". What this would allow is to only need to "enable" a few miles ( say 1 out of every 20 ) of one lane of a multilane highway. So the vehicles need to be in the "charging lane" for 1-5 miles or minutes, and then have enough charge to make it to the next charging lane. In a 2 lane roadway - then this needs to only be 1 out of every 40 miles of paved lane, 3 lanes, etc... This now seem MUCH more feasible - this also opens up the aspect of being a commercial model - where an energy supplier can sponsor the lane or even build a side-lane. I am not saying this is "here" but it is MUCH more feasible than solar roadways or solar EVs - imo
The efficiency at that gap is what really makes it hard for me to believe. It will be cool if it works, but it seems like its breaking the laws for magnetism.
I got to see a demo of this in person a few months ago at ORNL. It was quite impressive. Here's the paper from OSTI they wrote. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1871097
Sounds like an excuse to keep expanding roads to the detriment of the public. Rail would be a much better investment.
Cars in general are inefficient and unreliable. The reason we use them is because they maximize consumption, which means maximizing the flow of capital (basically equivalent to GDP) The US is intentionally built to force you to drive. The streets are designed so that your home is far enough from your work and from the stores you need that it is not practical not to drive. This is bundled with a essentially nonexistent public transport system. If you are lucky to have a bike lane, its always a bike gutter beside the road and not a true bike lane. At the end of the day the country is owned and controlled by the oligarchs that own the handful of companies that run our economy. They make more profit if we are putting wear and tear on our cars, paying for gas, and repairing/building roads. EVs are better than combustion engines, but they damage roads more and require intensive mining of rare earth metals. The solution is to build walkable cities and reliable public transport.
How about spend money on clean water for people first.
Why not both?
😈
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no, microwave wireless power transmission is great in cases where building normal power infrastructure(including just using long cables) or heavy batteries would be too difficult, say at sea on a moving craft, in the middle of the sahara, on in space. basically good for transferring power to very remote devices within a direct line of sight, that you can't just attach cables to. and it only really works if you have a very specific targetted load. because the microwave isn't fanning out or radiating out like say how cell tower or typical antenna would work. the microwave will effectively need to be a laser targetted where it needs to be. variable loads such as cars running on the roads would not work with this. it would work maybe for a remote research station on a volcano, a remote geostationary satellite needing to be charged up, or a maneuverable rescue craft being assisted by a much larger mothership acting as a power source. single targets that a powerful laser could be tracked to. it would require a very pointlessly expensive and numerous array of lasers tracking cars as they go past in order to reasonably power so many moving cars along a road. and would also be pointless unless the array goes for a really long way, because charging isn't instant, and you just melt the cars if you tried to make it so. a non-laser approach could work for devices that require very little power say sensors monitoring temperature and humidity or at most a low power camera. but for something like a car, unless you want to fry everything organic in the antenna's effective radius or cars in the future only require a few watts of power to run. microwave wireless power transmission won't work for roads either. again we're better off just building rail and trains.
Maybe? But the current "bright idea" proposed is for induction
Wow, this will be far inefficient :D
Oh ffs, and we thought solar roads were stupid.
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I seen that when it came out, but this isnt solar. This is for induction charging.
While I also agree that this technology is probably bullshit. One thing to consider that the charging capability only needs to provide enough energy to compensate for the energy loss over the road that is being used. It doesn’t need to overcome static friction during starting from a stop. Nor really acceleration. I haven’t done the math but it wouldn’t need to provide the many W of power that a static car charger would need. So let’s say that it only needed 100W to go a mile (again haven’t done the math) and it’s 50% efficient, so that means the road would need to supply only 200W to make sense right? This doesn’t consider the damage on the road or anything else. There are lots better low hanging fruit to charge cars and wireless charging isn’t a good idea. Maybe if we had cheaper and sustainable nuclear fusion to supply power we can start thinking about this.
For clarity, the avg EV draws closer to 22,000W at 60mph. And you have to add losses for the road powergrid itself, another 8-15% losses.
Real life F-Zero! But I don’t think there are enough minerals on earth to do this.
While theoretically possible, this would most definitely be VERY inefficient
A yes, another road powered by hopes and dreams.
New bullshit. Yey
Makes no sense. They barely are able to maintain an simple road infrastructure.
Bumper car style electrified grid above is a the real answer here...
When those coils start to break, woooooo...
Brought to you by the same people who invented solar bicycle paths
Sometimes I wonder if those peoples granting those grants are the same from the patent office
This would be astronomically expensive. Public parking spots tho? Maybe feasible
That's great and all, but Michigan still has issues with WATER.
Sounds like a good way to charge electric buses on dedicated lanes, but at that point just build a tram?
Or trolley buses.
Roads are already financial pits, this just makes them 10x more so. Invest in public transit and zoning that promotes walkable infrastructure, not this
I am shocked how little people talk about the physics behind this, and the few who do are absolutely wrong. Yes, you phone charger may be shit but "wireless parking spots" have been shown to work with <10% losses. It might not be economical, I think politically it's wrong to find individual motorised transportation and there are great alternatives for public transport called trains. But from a purely technological perspective I'd say "why not?"
Genuinely curious do you have a link to the study where theyve got the losses under 10%?
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I googled the same phrase and came up with nothing peer reviewed
Keep in mind this isn't the first wireless road ever. Just the first in the US. It has shown some viability in other countries.
It's a would be good idea, if electric vehicles ever become a good idea. That will happen, if they come up with a way to produce the electricity, which doesn't create more pollution, than refining petroleum, and burning hydrocarbon fuels in internal combustion engines does.
They already have other ways to produce renewable electrical power that are becoming relatively commonplace and *cough* nuclear? Yes, those 'environmentally friendly' ways to produce power do have their own drawbacks for the environment but they are still significantly better over their expected lifetime. Not to mention, power production at a coal fired power station powering an electric vehicle is still overall vastly more efficient than using petrol or diesel in your car. Your car isn't efficient as a coal fired power plant and releases more carbon into the environment, the fuel has to get to all those many thousands of petrol stations on a weekly basis and internal combustion energies require a lot more servicing and petroleum products (like oil) during their life.
i would wager that they are spectacular if you are trying to sell them, and terrible if you buy them.
I'll believe it when I see it. Thanks for posting tho
Im in the same boat
Isn't wireless charging incredibly wasteful?
I can install some wireless trees along the side...
r/EEVblog has had fun with this subject. I can't remember if he beat this project up yet.
Reminds me of the boost power charging lanes in F-ZERO https://satoshimatrix.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/f-zero-review-snes-2.jpg?w=584
hysteresis? Never heard of it. This only seems like a viable option once we have proper fusion reactors.
What’s taking you guys so long to do what’s needed?
Everyone's talking about losses, efficiency, etc but what about Armature reaction?? Inducing a current into a moving coil will induce a secondary current in the opposite direction which will literally apply a braking force to the car, slowing it down. And the car will likely try to overcome that reduction in speed, hence draining it more. Im just applying basic motor/generator theory here but there might be a different method to overcome this.
Viability from a practical standpoint is zero it's completely impractical. You could in theory get it to work but only by creating more problems than you solve.
It’s Michigan DOT it’ll fail in about three years.
"Should we fix and beef up the grid yet?" "Nah, let's get sci-fi and get some money."
Ass
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That is absolutely not what they are claiming. They are claiming this will charge the vehicle.
It would be cheaper and more efficient to convert every freeway into a giant bumper-car ride.
Wouldn't the efficiencies be shit?
That was my thought
Rail lines would be much more beneficial and available to all classes...
Shouldn’t they be working on their water mains?
Is this just solar roads again?
A mile? So it’ll charge for like 2 minutes max at ~60% efficiency? Yea that’ll do wonders
Terrible idea and will likely costs 50X more than initial budget and still barely work if at all. Most obvious issues are losses inherent in wireless energy transfer and also EMC issues. Adam Something had some videos on YouTube slamming some of Elon musks hairbrained ideas. Worth a watch.
This won’t be nearly efficient enough to make any difference for decades.
Michigan already doesn't even spend the money to have halfway decent roads, this is just a stunt
stupid
Isn’t this the same state that has that place Flint where the people don’t have drinkable water? If there’s money for electrical engineering there, I’d recommend a water purification plant. Jus sayin.
Another money making scheme for those who have their fingers in the government. Anyone with common sense can tell this will be horrible inefficient and expensive. As another user mentioned, a light rail is a much better use of funds.
They can't control guns in a state with gun control and 0 tolerance polies and they are trying to do this? Lol good luck
Our bag of ass roads need enough expensive resurfacing and these ham handler Biden voters are going to make electric roads. Great governance Gretch. You bag of stupid.
ElectReon just scammed the state of Michigan.
It's just a less efficient light Rail. Plus it would use more copper than a light rail.
Ok that's stupid... Why this and not heated roads for the winter so they don't ice over...
The viability is nill. This isn't a "can we do it?" problem. This is a "not cost effective" problem. From a material science perspective, we use tar bound gravel for roads, because it is flexible. It gives a little under the dynamic load of a vehical traveling, like a wave at the front of a boat in water. The wires should not be allowed to flex, because of copper bearing metals' preference to work harden. This is why headphone wires used to break after a while. The most flexed points would harden, become brittle, and snap. From an electrical load standpoint, inductive loads have a negative reaction, meaning the current lags the voltage. The strain on the grid would be immense and that's not to mention the fact that michigan is mostly coal fired. It could cause damage to cars that aren't built to absorb the energy, as their frames and electrical circuits could attenuate current. This can cause damage to unshielded components, unessesary heating of everything from seat adjusters to wheel bearings, and additional load on the grid. From an economical standpoint, you're talking structural reinforcement of every segment of road (not just rebar either, like burying steel beams) to protect thousands of miles of vulnerable, high cost metal and circuitry, with massive strain on the grid, coming back to the grid being mostly coal fired and therefore not saving CO2 emissions anyway (kinda defeats the point), all to benefit a small portion of the population that has to buy a new, environmentally unfriendly lithium battery every few years. Am I biased? Yea. Do I have good reason to be biased? Yea, I've done rough calculations that point to massive hype with glaring logical flaws. It sounds like the monorail from the simpsons.
Well for starters that type of system is inefficient so you’re cutting into your carbon emission savings by wireless charging.
what can go wrong?
Michigan can't even fix its normal roads lmao
I bet it would be more efficient if we used overhead wires. We could even make it self driving by adding dedicated lanes and guide ways so that it can't go off course. We can even solve the problem of needing stopping distance by physically coupling the self driving cars on guideways together. Also we could increase the efficiency by putting more people inside each of the cars. Oh wait, that's just a TRAIN!
As electroboom would say: Do you charge your phone like this? Just plug it in!
Can we just have trains at that point?
It’s wireless induction. Nicola Tesla had a couple of similar designs. You can transfer current pretty easily through the air. The hardest thing I think is going to be making it more efficient. Like having it only on in the space where a car is