Discussion on:

DOE: Wireless car charging is the future

why not develope an alternator to charge the car

The hybrids have alternators and generators for the regenerative breaking. The idea is to use the gas engine as little as possible or gwt away from gas alltogether.

My old unused engineering brain cells remind me of how an EMF can be used to produce a current. Something rotating, some wire coils and bingo, a current is produced to charge a battery. Now, can anyone tell me what part of a car goes round? So why can't the movement in the crank shaft, drive shaft or the wheels not be harnessed?

This is a ridiculous waste of time and money! It is far more important to develop the efficiency of electric vehicles, better solar charging, and regenerative braking than to worry about how to charge electric vehicles. This is just a ploy for the cities to get more of the taxpayer???s dollar. I do not see any reason that with the advancements that are coming along our new vehicles cannot charge themselves. We need to get the blinders off of the horse!

I disagree. One of the biggest problems with electric cars is the time needed to charge the battery. If has to be done at a "gas station" when you run low, then the process needs to take just minutes. If it can be done during the day while you're spending hours at work, shopping, etc., then it doesn't need to happen as quickly. Inductive charging seems like it will waste a lot of power in transferring the charge, but it does eliminate the need to plug in a cable.

My coworker owns a Leaf and with the standard charger, it would take 20+ hours to get to a full charge from empty...
I don't know about you, but I never park at a McDonalds for more than 30 minutes!
And since we all know that inductive charging supplies less power than plug-in charging, this would take even *LONGER*!~
and heaven forbid if a neighbor pet decides to run under your car between the "Power Capture resonator" and "Power Source Resonator" while you are charging!

The electric gig is just another Obama lie to suck more tax money from the public.
What is with Obama and electric anyway???

The real, "liquid" solution (much like gas) is liquid hydrogen. GM dumped a liquid hydrogen car, not because it didn't work, but most likely because it would end up taking over the electric car.

Scientifically liquid hydrogen production is very doable. Combined with safe nuclear, liquid hydrogen could be produced at night, while during the day electric generation would be produced -- both forms of power would then be transported side-by-side to new power-grid stations (hence, liquid hydrogen distribution stations, like refineries are today),
This is what we should be working on. It's already proven to be doable over time. Like any great investment it would take time. All great inventions do,e.g., trains, phone systems, etc).

There you have it -- but now, instead we are continuously being forced-fed obama care and electric cars. If this chaos in the White House continues we'll all be sick, and your electric bill will be more than you earn in a month.

You're welcome!

your thinking is so 1999...
Hydrogen? Really? Heck, if that's the case, then why not go steam! They have these rocks in Pennsylvania that are black, and when you set them on fire, they burn for extended periods of time...we can shove these into some kind of "furnace" to heat a "kettle" of water to produce "steam" which can then be use to somehow propel the vehicle!
Here's an idea...instead of living with your mind firmly planted in prior centuries, why not adopt a truly modern approach to supplying energy.
Let me suggest that you google the term "ionic liquid battery"
Yes, I know that this is not currently available, but it is the most promising technology for rapid fueling of electric power...

You're welcome!

Both Stanford and MIT have systems for recharging while driving. To me, this makes more sense than huge electric batteries taking hours to recharge. Smartplanet Feb 3, 2012 article:
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/smart-takes/with-wireless-power-charge-your-electric-car-while-driving/22321?tag=content;siu-container

I have advocated an inductive road system for over 3 years. Each car using the system would have an RFID chip to have the system record the car's electric usage and to activate the induction charge while the vehicle is over the system. Each driver would have an RFID driver's license inserted for use by law enforcement, traffic management, automatic hand's free driving and more. When on the interstate highway, rails would function for maglev transport. Three years ago, I published this web article (go to section 9):
http://www.techok.org/

I believe this system, if adopted nationwide/worldwide would revolutionize transportation as we know it.

John Hite, retired, Oklahoma City

I was going to comment on this forum suggesting that, when I read what you wrote. I think that is the way things should go: no battery, or a smaller one would solve a big problem in the way of electric cars.

There are at least 3 other EV charging stations companies that could also do this: Better Place, Coulomb Technologies (they are hiring: (http://www.thegreenjobbank.com/employers/coulomb-technologies), and Amprius (from Stanford U.).
I wouldn't be surprised if one of more of them picked up some of the 4 contracts.

Imbedded inductive chargers a health hazard for anyone with a pace maker or other implanted device. Federal safety regulations limit the power output of both in ground or over head charging units in public places where people might walk over or under them.

This power restriction limits the effective range of recharge to just a few inches. Efficiency decreases with increasing distance between elements. Boosting power helps to a point, but makes them more dangerous to people with implanted devices.

An under vehicle charger where a person with an implanted device might drive over brings up concerns over proper shielding of the under carriage to protect the driver because the driver is closer to the ground than walking over a charging pad.

An increasing number of implanted medical devices are recharged using low power inductive charging. This advance in medicine makes them more vulnerable to strong recharging fields than older implanted devices.

This safety concern has been the downfall of all attempts at imbedded or overhead recharging of EV???s.

Progress is being made in improve efficiency at greater ranges and lower power levels. It is almost there.

Just who do you think will be paying for these high-tech charging schemes?
Whatever the process, it needs to be easy and cheap. So far, the long-term plugin has the advantage, whether at home or at the workplace or shopping place.

It does seem a bit dim to me. Wireless power transfer is a up-coming thing in (for example) contactless payment systems (Near Field Communications). However these systems need only to transfer milliwatts of power. Inefficiencies are not too important. Up-scaling this to transfer KW will involve very high power AC magnetic fields. These are not only hazardous to those with pacemakers! There will be also be large leakage fields.

Furthermore, a connector is essentially 100% efficient. In an age when energy efficiency will be so critically important. Given the very big energy needed for heavy road transport fleets anyway, the loss of only a few percent would be irresponsible and damaging. The energy efficiency of these systems will be far from ideal, especially given the inherent variabilities in what needs to be a very carefully tuned system. Who pays for the powerlosses, and do they have the "right" or moral authority to throw away energy in this way?

And it won't half get noisy. If something can resonate it will. We have a lot of steel in our cars. Whoa, - there will be so many problems with those powerful stray AC magnetic fields.
And more on safety. - Who pays when a shorted coil of wire in the back of an electrician's waggon goes up in smoke?

Wireless electricity is generally called lightning... I know this is different, but what about areas with a lot of lightning??? What happens when it strikes an electric car or a hydrogen car? And what happens if you are parked on one of these wireless charging stations and lightning strikes? Or driving along a wireless power grid and lightning strikes? Or what happens when it rains, or the underside of out car gets wet? The odds of being struck by lightning can be increased several magnitude should we fail to consider the inevitable and obvious.

Also... Why are hybrids and electric cars painted and not skinned in PVs? PVs charge in indirect light as well as direct light and making the body out of PVs or skinning a car in PVs sounds like a no brainer to me. Those people would be fighting over the sunny parking spaces.

Also... Why hasn't someone combined a hybrid and hydrogen and solar car all in one??? The car could generate hydrogen with any extra electricity as well as use hydrogen to augment the gas (mix with it to increace fuel efficiency), or run on hydrogen instead of gas. With a solar skin the car could recharge while being driven/parked and if the batteries peaked, then the extra electricity could generate more hydrogen as well as run cooling fans (as this would most likely happen in summer conditions). To me, that also seems like a no brainer.

Please correct me if I'm wrong but didn't a generator/alternator keep a car battery charged while driving?
With all the energy that a car produces as it is moving, can't that energy be harnessed in an electric car and keep the battery charged so the driver doesn't have to stop every 300 to 400 miles to recharge for hours?
And whatever happened to "Hydrogen" power? I thought the California Governor had a great idea. Too bad California didn't have the money in their budget to continue their project.

"can't that energy be harnessed in an electric car and keep the battery charged"

Uh...what you're talking about is called "Perpetual motion" and it is not possible...something to do with the laws of physics and the first *AND* second laws of thermodynamics...
Look it up.

It does not exist such a generator/alternator able to generate more current than the necessary for generate it. Battery power in the electric car transforms into mechanical power, which feeds the generator/alternator. Final electric power obtained at this stage is much less than the consumed energy for moving the car.
Otherwise, we??ve got the perpetual movement solved.

Seriously?! 12 million dollar to invent stuff? That might not even be possible... What happenend to eletrical "gas"-stations?

You can also increase the usage of a car by putting solar panels on the roof.

Plus, we are not doen developping the basis of electrical cars! Their are still a lot of gas - powered cars out there. So quite the nonsense and do something that matters.

Great idea and marvell wait to solve solution. We must focus on many challenges to streamline our car charging and battery to embrace mass market adoption. Then we will take another next step.

You jusy need the infrastructure to support it. An example is http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/wec.shtml and http://www.powercastco.com/

Maybe batteries will improve quickly but ive previously thought that charging might be needed at traffic lights etc. And depending on charge times etc it might be better to have several batteries per car and have battery stations that you drive on to that automatically swap one or more from underneith ur car.

This could be extended to charging on the highways by having charging plates imbeded in the roadways, eliminating large battery requirements.Coded signals transmitted by the vehicles would turn them on only as the vehicle passed over them, saving power! This could be kept track of amounts of power used, and billed to owners. Also, the tracking, and possibly disabling, of the vehicle could be done, VERY handy for 'Big Brother'!

I saw a documentary quite a while ago, where similar to solar panels, they use infra red panels to carry over power remotely, this should work and also it would charge from the sun also...