Maybe in SoCal the roads never get messed up because the weather is so nice?
Here in NC our weather swings between -12°C and 40°C, and we get decent rainfall all year, I think of potholes, and nasty dropped pieces of car and truck parts, ladders and lumber, sagging shoulders, bermudagrass infiltrating the pavement, etc., on one hand. And the uncountable millions of wires to collect these electrons? Now buried just below the surface of a roadway. This is going to last how long before it degrades and has to be repaired, and what does that take? Even if it can be done, I doubt the real world, scaled up application works well. I am very doubtful. Maybe someone will devise a fabric that contains piezo elements and conductors, by some very automated, continuous process. There was a project at NC State to make pipe insulation by some sort of non-woven textile process that had thermocouples (a thermopile of them) in it that would make power from the temperature gradient between the inner and outer surfaces. It looked like a real trick to get the current out of it (resistance), and how to connect to it, service it, and change/repair it when damaged. This roadway/power plant is kind of like combining solar PV and solar thermal in the same collector - yeah you can do it but the complication is much greater and all you really get is PV running a little cooler, with better efficiency, if you actually use the thermal to do that. You are far better off having separate collectors on for moving electrons and the other for moving heat. The complication of putting them together negates the added efficiency. You are far better off having a well built, simple, durable road, and a solar farm beside it. I prefer to see some of the real estate beside and in the medians of roadways used for PV. -- To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. Thomas A. Edison <http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/thomasaed125362.html> A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought. *Warren Buffet* Michael E. Ross (919) 585-6737 Land (919) 576-0824 <https://www.google.com/voice/b/0?pli=1#phones> Mobile and Google Phone michael.e.r...@gmail.com <michael.e.r...@gmail.com> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20160827/eb3205ff/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Read EVAngel's EV News at http://evdl.org/evln/ Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
