Paul Dove via EV wrote:
It's called inductive charging. I have a toothbrush that uses this technology.
GM was the first to do this with electric cars with the EV1 but they never put
it into production that I know of.
Hi Paul,
Inductive charging is in fact a lot older. There were inductive chargers
in the 1920's. It's basically just a conventional transformer cut in
half, with one half in the floor and the other half in the car. Park
over it, switch it on, and the two halves clamp together like a big
electromagnet. Now you have a "whole" transformer, and it charges the
car like any other transformer.
Inductran Corp has been making inductive chargers for factory EV since
at least the early 1970's. I'm sure there are other suppliers as well,
since the original patents on the idea are long expired.
GM patented their version of it (which used higher frequencies, to get
the size of the transformer halves down). They called it the
"magnecharger", and tried to get it legislated as the standard way to
charge EVs (by making everything else illegal). Ford of course came up
with a competitive standard (Avcon). The result was that neither of them
succeeded (like VHS and Betamax; both lost in the end).
Though in the case of this particular press release, they aren't talking
about inductive charging. They are pretending that the two parts of a
motor (stator and rotor) are separate, so that their "breakthrough" is
to "wirelessly" transfer power between them (which all motors do anyway).
--
The greatest pleasure in life is to create something that wasn't
there before. -- Roy Spence
--
Lee Hart, 814 8th Ave N, Sartell MN 56377, www.sunrise-ev.com
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