On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:45:43 -0400, you wrote:
>John Fields wrote:
>
>>As far as electric vehicles goes, I think the idea of a non-plug-in
>>charger is pure insanity.
>
>I think so too, but an intriguing idea would be electric vehicles
>without pantographs, on roads equipped with wireless chargers under
>the surface. This would not be a viable replacement for conventional
>automobiles. But maybe it would work for something like an airport,
>in which many small automatic vehicles replace the automated subway
>and rail systems they have now, which are like horizontal elevators,
>with inflexible paths. It would be nice if one automatic car could
>stop at a gate while others zip by it. We could do this with battery
>electric cars of course. There might not be an advantage.
---
Nice idea, but I think the problem with getting the power into the cars'
motors inductively would be that the air gap between the receiver on the
car and the transmitter in the road would waste so much power as to make
it impractical.
---
>Perhaps it would work in a large city center with high population
>density, such as Manhattan. Only small, specially-made, fully
>electric passenger vehicles would be allowed. You would not need a
>charger under every meter of every road. You would not have to dig up
>every street in Manhattan! I suppose one every few blocks in an urban
>area might work. Sort of like cell phone towers.
---
Except that that would be like expecting the output from the cell phone
towers to power the cell phones. ;)
Same problem with the electric airport cars; the distance between the
transmitters and receivers and the inverse square law, which our dear
Mother Nature invokes in order to keep us from blowing up the universe,
makes the field strength fall off so quickly as the distance between
them increases.
---
>I think the best use for it might be to power a million nano-machines
>that are working inside a vat, let us say, or inside a human body
>looking for cancerous cells.
---
I like that, but I think they'd have to get their power
electrochemically, just like everybody else in the mix, and have their
waste products eliminated transparently in order to keep from being
toxic.
I think we're not there yet...
