A lot of things are possible with microwaves. It can cook your food or help you connect to the internet. Flight radars, Satellite TVs, health care equipment, and a lot more. But the best part is when it can power your EV.
This concept is still under development but has the potential to eliminate the use of batteries. Concept of wireless power transmission may change your view of wireless devices.
You can use phones and smartwatches that do not need a battery but can get electric power from a nearby power station. Also, if it is efficient enough, this can substitute household wiring as well.
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More on wireless power transmission using microwaves
While I was searching for inputs for this article, I found an amazing article on the internet. This was about satellite power stations.
The biggest disadvantage of solar power generation is that it cannot produce power at night. Even during the day, clouds can block the sun. Therefore, we need a different source of power to compensate for the shortfall of power.
To overcome this, one can use satellite power stations. The idea is to use solar panels that harvest energy from the sun and send it to earth using microwaves. Since it is outside the earth, it can produce power 24 hours a day. Interested to know more, check on the article about this technology on the Forbes website.
But this is difficult, as it would cost a lot of money for this project. Countries like China are working on these satellites.
Wireless power transmission using microwaves
There are three main steps to achieve this.
- Converting electric power to microwaves.
- Transmission of these waves to the target device.
- Harvesting energy from the microwave.
Electric Power to Microwaves
The first step here is to convert the electric energy to microwave. This is very similar to producing any microwaves.
A magnetron is used to produce them and you can see this in a microwave oven. I don’t want to cover how a magnetron works. All you need to know is that it is used to generate our waves.
Transmission of these waves to the target device
Here we use beamforming of microwaves. To understand the need for beamforming, one needs to know how wireless communication takes place.
In wireless communication, the waves have a spherical wavefront. In simple words, the waves spread out in all the directions. But if we use similar waves for power transmission, we lose a lot of energy.
Therefore, we need waves that focus on a specific target, your cars. Beamforming does that.
The system comprises a base station which is connected to the grid. The base station has a transmitter which sends the focussed microwaves to the receiver. The receiver which is your car receives these waves and convert them to electricity.
Beamforming leads to a problem here. How would the transmitter know the exact location of the receiver? This problem is eliminated by using pilot signals. Your car should signal the transmitter, and hence the transmitter would use this to locate your car.
Harvesting energy
The next step is to convert this electromagnetic energy to electricity. Rectenna is the device that does this work.
As the name suggests, it is a rectifying antenna, and it receives EM waves and convert them to DC. Again, I am not covering the working of the rectenna here.
Advantages
The main advantage of using this technology is the elimination of batteries. They are very heavy and is very hard to power trucks as it would reduce the payload capacity. Also, lithium is one of the chief components of modern batteries, and mining this degrades the environment.
Since batteries are the most expensive part of an electric vehicle, it gets cheaper. Also, vehicles get lighter.
In some unfortunate circumstances, batteries may catch fire or even explode. We eliminate this is now. Same is true when we consider hydrogen in fuel cell electric vehicles.
Just like paying mobile bills, one can pay the charges for powering his car. The biggest disadvantage of EV – Range anxiety is eliminated while using wireless power transmission. Just like trains that have over-head lines to power it all the time, cars have these base stations to power them all the time.
Challenges
Obviously, this is not a readily available technology. Therefore, we need more research in this field before it is deployed in the market. Also, the cost of setting up the infrastructure is very high. Even if there is a breakthrough, powering an Ev using this technology may not be achieved for various reasons.
Microwaves directly hit the target and as I mentioned above, pilot signals to know the location of your car. This becomes more tricky as cars are not stationary and the transmitter should be capable of sending the microwaves accurately for every change in the vehicle’s position.
A small lane change or obstacles like buildings may disrupt the incoming wave.
If there is more traffic, the system must be capable of powering all the vehicles.
Using microwaves to power vehicles may pose some health hazards. This may affect the birds and other species.
This does not eliminate the use of battery completely as we require some backup to tackle emergency situations.
Finally
The future of the automotive industry is still uncertain. Many believe that it is definitely electric, and even if it is true, we are not so sure about the exact form of electric. It can be batteries, fuel cells, ultra-capacitors, or even microwaves. Therefore, it is better to appreciate every form and develop the technology until we achieve what we need.
Also, if microwaves cannot be used to power an Ev on the go, it can be used to charge them while at parking lots.
For more articles on electric vehicles, click here.
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