WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Increasingly countries and tech companies are weaning themselves off of American technologies and platforms, and China is advancing fast.

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As we continue to see global technology decoupling and separation Huawei has finally announced its new Mate 70 series smartphone lineup, which will be the first to be offered with the company’s new HarmonyOS Next operating system that doesn’t rely on Google’s Android services and won’t run any Android apps, according to a report by Reuters. And, in yet another highly significant milestone, the four models of the Mate 70 also don’t feature any US hardware following almost half a decade of US sanctions.

The Mate 70, Mate 70 Pro, Mate 70 Pro Plus, and Mate 70 RS will also be offered with Huawei’s HarmonyOS 4.3, which first launched in August 2019 as an alternative to Google’s Android OS and is still compatible with Android’s extensive app library. Users who decide to opt for Huawei’s new Android-free HarmonyOS Next will have less choice when it comes to the apps they can install. Huawei says it has “secured more than 15,000 applications for its HarmonyOS ecosystem, with plans to expand to 100,000 apps in the coming months,” according to Reuters. Starting next year, Huawei also says all the new phones and tablets it launches in 2025 will run HarmonyOS Next.

The base model Huawei Mate70 features a 6.7-inch display with up to 120Hz refresh rates, a 5,300mAh battery, 66W fast charging with a USB-C cable, and wireless charging at speeds of up to 50W, according to Gizmochina. It includes a 50MP main camera with optical image stabilization (OIS), a 12MP telephoto periscope camera with OIS, a 40MP ultra wide angle camera, and a front-facing 13MP ultra wide selfie camera. It starts at 5,499 yuan (around $760) for a version with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

The Huawei Mate70 Pro includes upgrades like support for Wi-Fi 7, satellite communications, faster charging, a larger screen, a 48MP telephoto camera, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered photography features, and starts at 6,499 yuan (around $898). The Huawei Mate70 Pro Plus adds improved sensors on some of its cameras and a bump in base specs to 16GB of RAM with 512GB of storage for 8,499 yuan (around $1,174). The Huawei Mate70 RS offers all the functionality of the Mate70 Pro Plus with premium build materials like titanium, which bumps its starting price to 11,999 yuan (around $1,657).

Huawei hasn’t confirmed what processors are being used in the Mate 70 lineup, but the company has previously used chips made by China’s SMIC for last year’s Mate 60 series and other smartphones.

Huawei has also announced its new Mate X6, which is the company’s next smartphone with a folding screen. It features a 7.93-inch internal display and a 6.45-inch external screen, both slightly larger than those Huawei offered on the Mate X5. Huawei is using a mix of carbon fiber and aluminum on the X6 for improved durability, according to Android Headlines, which also helps make it slightly thinner – the X6 measures in at 9.85mm thick when folded, and 4.6mm thick when opened.

In addition to 8MP selfie cameras on both the internal and external display, the X6 has a 50MP main camera on the back alongside a 48MP telephoto periscope camera and a 40MP ultra wide camera.

The Mate X6 standard model will start with 12GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and include a 5,110mAh battery for 12,999 yuan (around $1,790). A collector’s edition model will also be available that bumps the starting specs to 16GB of RAM with 512GB of storage with a larger 5,200mAh battery for 14,999 yuan (around $2,06) while also adding satellite communications capabilities, according to Huawei Central.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

There are many advantages to generating solar power in space and beaming it back to Earth, it’s cheap, unlimited, constant, and can be beamed anywhere in seconds.

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The idea of solar energy being transmitted from space is not a new one, and recently China, the UK who invested $20Bn in the concept, and the USA all want in as they eye up being able to beam Gigawatts of solar energy from space to any point on Earth for practically zero cost.

In 1968, a NASA engineer named Peter Glaser produced the first concept design for a solar-powered satellite. But only now, 55 years later, and after the US military recently conducted a limited field test does it appear scientists have actually carried out the successful experiment.

A team of researchers from Caltech announced on Thursday that their space-borne prototype, called the Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1), had collected sunlight, converted it into electricity and beamed it to microwave receivers installed on a rooftop on Caltech’s Pasadena campus. The experiment also proves that the equipment, which launched on January 3, is capable of surviving the trip to space, along with the harsh environment of space itself.

“To the best of our knowledge, no one has ever demonstrated wireless energy transfer in space even with expensive rigid structures. We are doing it with flexible lightweight structures and with our own integrated circuits. This is a first,” said Ali Hajimiri, professor of electrical engineering and medical engineering and co-director of Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project (SSPP), in a press release.

The experiment — known in full as Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment (or MAPLE for short) — is one of three research projects being carried out aboard the SSPD-1. The effort involved two separate receiver arrays and lightweight microwave transmitters with custom chips, according to Caltech. In its press release, the team added that the transmission setup was designed to minimize the amount of fuel needed to send them to space, and that the design also needed to be flexible enough so that the transmitters could be folded up onto a rocket.

Space-based solar power has long been something of a holy grail in the scientific community. Although expensive in its current form, the technology carries the promise of potentially unlimited renewable energy, with solar panels in space able to collect sunlight regardless of the time of day. The use of microwaves to transmit power would also mean that cloud cover wouldn’t pose an interference, as Nikkei notes.

Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project (SSSP) is hardly the only team that has been attempting to make space-based solar power a reality. Late last month, a few days before Caltech’s announcement, Japan’s space agency, JAXA, announced a public-private partnership that aims to send solar power from space by 2025. The leader of that project, a Kyoto University professor, has been working on space-based solar power since 2009. Japan also had a breakthrough of its own nearly a decade ago in 2015, when JAXA scientists transmitted 1.8 kilowatts of power — about enough energy to power an electric kettle — more than 50 meters to a wireless receiver.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

What if you could just beam energy from space to anywhere on Earth? It would change global energy generation …

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As we continue to see various countries around the world invest more in building and testing space based solar power plants New Zealand wireless energy company Emrod says it’s got the technology needed “to enable the efficient wireless transfer of energy from orbit.” And it’s proposing a space based global wireless energy grid which would instantly beam renewable energy generated in space via satellite between any two points on Earth.

Furthermore, to realise their ambitions the company has just demonstrated its wireless power beaming technology to Airbus and the European Space Agency (ESA) as part of the ESA’s new push toward 24-hours-a-day space-based solar power.

The idea of space-based solar is not new, but the problem has always been size – you’d need transmitters and receivers about 2 km (1.2 miles) in diameter to shift a couple of gigawatts of energy down to Earth from a geostationary orbit some 36,000 km (22,370 miles) away. Building an array that size on Earth would be a huge challenge. Building one in space? Yikes.

Emrod says its near-field energy beams could get the job done much more efficiently than competing technologies. But Emrod founder Greg Kushnir also thinks there’s a much cheaper and easier way to satisfy European – and indeed global – renewable energy needs: by setting up a space based global wireless energy grid capable of beaming power instantaneously around the planet by using lower orbiting satellites that could be significantly smaller. You’d get 24-hour renewable energy, anywhere, out of low-cost solar assets right here on Earth.

I’ve written before about how countries like Australia and China want to connect together the world’s terrestrial energy grids by laying tens of thousands of miles of ultra high-voltage power lines. Emrod’s World Energy Grid concept would need far less ground- and ocean-floor-based infrastructure, eliminating a ton of planning and execution headaches – or at least replacing those headaches with new orbital ones. But if you built a giant solar array in the Sahara desert in Libya, then just as the midday sun is beating down and creating maximum power, you could send that energy right across to power Shanghai as the sun begins to set.

“Essentially,” says Kushnir, “we’ve been talking about decoupling where energy is generated from where it’s consumed for a few years now. It would be the same order of magnitude of revolution as what wireless communication as done for our economy. You once had to move value from one side of the world to the other in the form of gold, in a sack on a ship. Now you can move financial value at the speed of light through wireless communication using satellites. But why just harvest the information out of those electromagnetic waves? Why not harvest the actual energy from these waves? Or both?”

A global space grid?

The company has scaled up the small, lab-based designs I wrote about in 2020. The current square transmitting and receiving antenna prototypes are 1.92 m (6.3 ft) in diameter. In the ESA demonstration, this gear sent some clean energy from one side of an Airbus warehouse to the other – a gap of just 36 m (118 ft) – to power a model city, a hydrogen electrolyzer and a beer fridge for Oktoberfest.

But with the backing of NZ energy company Powerco it’s already proven capable of doing the same over at least 200 m (656 ft) outdoors, and the company says it’s ready for commercial deployment over much longer distances – basically, all that’s needed is a direct, clear line of sight between the antennas or relays.

A global wireless energy grid was of course proposed by Nikola Tesla around a century ago. The idea was famously shot down by banker J. P. Morgan, who asked, “if anyone can draw on the power, where do we put the meter?” Such a capitalist would have no such issue with Emrod’s point-to-point technology, which needs to be precisely aimed at large, meter-friendly receiver arrays.

“The technology is here,” says Kushnir. “It’s been developed, it’s starting to be deployed. And when Airbus wanted to demonstrate it as part of a space-based energy infrastructure, there was no other company in the world that could do it. In the last few months, it seems the industry has been catching up with our vision and starting to throw budgets and teams at this. But we have a head start, we started this three years ahead of everybody else.”

“It’s been floating around for decades,” he continued. “The thing is, all the other teams that looked at power beaming treated it like communications – as a far-field system. And with far-field systems, you get side lobes – you’re immediately giving up 15-20% of the power, which goes sideways. And the beam starts diverging, so you end up with a huge footprint and a gigantic antenna wherever you’re trying to collect the energy. so the cost/benefits of these studies have always looked unrealistic.

“We’re not working with a far-field system. We’ve gone back to first principles and looked at it very differently, using a near-field system. Near and far field, by the way, isn’t so much about distance, as about where you’re focusing the beam and at what stages you’re capturing it. We create a collimated beam with a phased array. It moves pretty much like it’s in a virtual wire. Very well defined, no side lobes. And we capture it in the near field, or the Fresnel zones, to be more accurate. In this demo a few days ago, we demonstrated a beam collection efficiency over 95%. We know how to bring it around 99%, so it’s already much more efficient than the theoretical limit you could get from a far-field system. Plus, we can make our antennas much smaller. We can benefit from focusing.”

The tech is ready to scale up to handle orbital distances at high efficiencies, and Kushnir says that with a leap in the efficiency of amplification, it’ll be as efficient – or more efficient – to move energy via satellite than via city power grids. “If you’re talking about what we could float up there in the next five years, it’s probably an end-to-end efficiency around 60-70%. If we’re talking about the European Space Agency’s space solar timescales for 2040-2050, we can get much higher, probably to the same efficiencies of most of the grids around the world. Maybe not European or American grids, but well above most of the grids in the world. The benchmark, I think, would be around 80-85%.”

Of course, in order to get a World Energy Grid up and running, you’re going to need a series of structures in space. These satellite antenna arrays would act more or less like lenses, taking an energy beam coming up from the ground, bending and refocusing it to send it on to another point, either straight back down to the ground or via another satellite. While these can be smaller than previously possible, they still won’t be small. The size will depend on the distance, the distance will affect how many satellites you’ll need in your constellation, and these will be just a few of the elements in a complex feasibility and cost-benefit equation.

As an idea of the size, if an antenna was placed in an orbit around 400-500 km (250-310 miles) up, it’d need to be about the same size as the 108-m (357-ft) structure of the International Space Station, which orbits at about the same height. It’ll be far less complex and expensive than that hundred-billion-dollar beast, but it’d still require a fair bit of space-based assembly, which will add to the challenge.

Emrod is looking at another proposal that would place satellites in much lower orbits closer to 100 km (62 miles) – those would only need to be 30-40 m (100-130 ft) across, and thus much cheaper to build and launch. But they wouldn’t transmit as far across the globe, and they’d be traveling so fast and so close to the Earth that there’d be considerable air friction to contend with.

Kushnir says the company is talking to a number of aerospace companies, hoping to have its first test rigs in orbit within three years: “That’ll be the first small step. Anything to do with space takes years and years. But then I think we can move much faster than the European Space Agency’s roadmap. It’s not going to take 20 years. Having said that, we’re not waiting for that to happen. This is a commercial endeavor; the first applications are terrestrial. We’re hoping to have the first commercial deployment in 2024.”

The biggest issues for Emrod at this stage, says Kushnir, aren’t the technology at all, or even the economics.

“For some reason,” he says, “there’s a cognitive gap for people. They have no problem believing they can pick up a phone – which uses electromagnetic waves sent via satellite – to communicate with people all over the world and send information. But it’s hard for people to accept you can do the same with energy, and that in terms of the physics, it’s not that different.

“So we have a lot to prove. I guess, in about two years, we’ll cross that Rubicon after we have the first couple of systems deployed out there commercially. Then we’ll start seeing them deployed more widely. The first set of applications will be where there are bottlenecks: issues with rights of passage or permitting, or undersea cables.”

From there, things could get really interesting; Kushnir says the company is at the early stages of developing a “Power Skin” that could turn the entire fuselage of an aircraft into a wide-angle antenna array capable of receiving power during flight, either from space-based or land-based transmitters. Such a thing could completely sidestep the energy storage issues that are putting the brakes on airline decarbonization, if Emrod could prove to aviation authorities that it was safe.

The other key issue Kushnir sees coming down the pipeline is global politics. “Well, it’s next-level energy infrastructure,” he says. “It’s gonna be highly politicized, just like GPS, or quantum computing, or any other breakthrough technology. But once you can send energy instantaneously, regardless of location, it doesn’t really matter if you border a country or if it’s on the other side of the world.” If you have a friendly country in the right time zone, where renewable energy is being generated right when you need it, your energy supply is as secure as that relationship.

If Emrod’s wireless power tech never makes it into space, and the best it manages is to replace some high-voltage power lines, it’ll still be a huge step forward. But considering the incredible money that’s being spent on projects like the $22 Billion Australia-Asia Power Link, which will send renewable energy from solar farms in the Australian desert all the way to Singapore via the world’s longest undersea cable, the astronomical costs of wireless power satellites could start to make sense.

A global wireless power grid that can efficiently link any two points on Earth – with much smaller terrestrial infrastructure, and without cutting great strips out of forests – would indeed be a game-changing leap forward in the global transition to clean energy. Cities would need far less energy storage to firm up their power grids – a huge advantage giving the coming lithium squeeze – and colossal solar farms could make productive use of some of the most remote and barren deserts on Earth. It’s a heck of an ambition, and we look forward to following Emrod’s progress.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Wires and cables suck but we’re stuck with them … or are we?

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I’ve been saying for years that one day TV’s, or just displays in general, will be completely wireless, and that when it comes to power they’ll be wirelessly charged. And, while we’ve seen wirelessly powered TV’s so far there’s never been a TV that’s completely wireless or cable free on all fronts – until now. Although that statement does come with one giant caveat in this case – that the TV’s battery powered. So we’re not quite at the finishing line yet.

At CES 2023, Displace showed how its futuristic 55-inch 4K TV utilizes a special pop-up camera to recognize gesture controls and a proprietary active-loop vacuum seal to adhere itself to walls while content’s streamed to it over WiFi.

Learn more about the TV

The gesture controls of the DisplaceTV that most caught our eye at the show were the ability to use your finger as a mouse to select particular on-screen channels/options, plus a fancy two-handed flourish to enlarge what’s on one screen to fill all four. By the way, such a configuration – a two-by-two grid of DisplaceTVs – would essentially create an 8K 110-inch TV capable of streaming four different channels at once. Or if you position them on different walls with their respective cameras popped up, you can enable your content to seamlessly follow you around the house.

In addition to gestures, you’ll also be able to control the TV with voice, touch, and an app. The display receives all its content from a separate base unit, into which you can plug all your video sources such as cable and streaming boxes, gaming console, Blu-ray player, and so on, somewhere else in the room. Thus your movies and shows stream from that box, which is potentially hidden from sight, to the actual display. In fact, a single base unit can send a signal to up to six different DisplaceTVs. And that’s why the display itself has no wires, plugs, ports or buttons – not even a power button to turn it on.

At less than 20 lb (9 kg), you can transport this svelte telly around the house and stick it to pretty much any smooth surface, including glass, concrete or drywall. Though it can store two batteries in its left side and two more in the right, it only needs one to be fully operational – thus allowing you to top off the other three, if necessary. When juiced up, all four batteries in the TV are rated to supply a staggering 180 hours of viewing – essentially a month’s worth of streaming TV and movies for a mind-numbing six hours a day.

Here’s a demonstration of the vacuum seal system in action:

If for some reason you forget to charge the batteries before you leave on holiday and the unit is in danger of falling off the wall, since ironically the vacuum seal requires power, the app will notify you and then deploy a series of two countermeasures to stick itself manually to the wall so it doesn’t tragically fall and crash. Apparently, they’ve thought of everything!

To wit, the company’s Founder & CEO, Balaji Krishnan, has quite a background in TV. Back in 2011, the serial entrepreneur founded Snapstick, a consumer device startup that brought the world’s first mobile-to-TV experience to peoples’ homes, and was acquired a few years later by TiVo. And then in 2015, he founded DabKick, which introduced both a smart streaming device and the ability for folks to livestream photos, music and videos all on the same screen.

When forming Displace, Krishnan hadn’t originally set out to create a wireless TV, but rather a series of smart displays around the house.

“We [had to] think backwards to see what are the things required to actually get to this mission,” Krishnan revealed to us at the company’s booth at CES. “And we wanted to remove all the friction points that people have with the biggest display you have in your home, which is television.” So they quite literally cut the cords and created their proprietary hot-swappable battery assembly system. Because as he put it, “You don’t want to be charging this TV every night like an iPad.”

Displace is currently taking reservations for their systems, each of which includes a base control unit, battery charging unit and four batteries per display. A refundable 10% deposit will lock in the following pricing: $2,999 for one DisplaceTV, $5,399 for two and $8,999 for four.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

New forms of transport are emerging all the time, and many have bold claims, so we’ll see how this one plays out.

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As various hyperloop companies around the world try to develop and commercialise their inventions, which will ultimately see people travelling in trains in vacuum tubes that exceed the speed of sound, TransPod, a Canadian start up has announced it’s “building the world’s leading ultra-high-speed ground transportation system – the TransPod Line”  has just unveiled FluxJet that ithopes will transform the way passengers and cargo are moved.

Based on “ground breaking innovations in propulsion and fossil-fuel-free clean energy systems,” the fully electric vehicle is a hybrid between an aircraft and a train. It features technological leaps in contactless power transmission and a new field of physics called Veillance Flux — enabling it to travel in a protected guideway at over 1000 km/h – faster than a jet and three times as fast as a conventional high speed train.

The Future of Transport, by keynote speaker Matthew Griffin

“This milestone is a major leap forward,” says Ryan Janzen, co-founder and CTO at TransPod. “The FluxJet is at a nexus of scientific research, industrial development, and massive infrastructure to address passengers’ needs and reduce our dependence on fossil fuel heavy jets and highways.”

Preliminary construction work on the FluxJet, including the environmental impact assessment, has already begun, and eventually it will operate exclusively on the TransPod Line, a network system with stations in key locations and major cities and featuring high-frequency departures designed to enable fast, affordable, and safe travel.

Learn more about the FluxJet

Most recently, TransPod announced the next phase of an $18B US infrastructure project to build the network system that will connect Calgary and Edmonton in Alberta, Canada.

According to the startup, this project will create up to 140,000 jobs and add $19.2B to the region’s GDP throughout construction. In addition, once the TransPod Line is in operation, it will cost passengers approximately 44% less than a plane ticket to travel the corridor and help reduce CO2 emissions by 636,000 tonnes per year.

“The FluxJet is a first for Canadian innovation and is the next great infrastructure project to be brought worldwide,” continues Janzen. “The TransPod Line is being developed in collaboration with our partners in Europe, USA, and beyond, including universities, research centers, the aerospace industry, architecture, railway, and construction partners.”

At TransPod’s unveiling event in Toronto, a scaled-down prototype was featured in a live demonstration showing its flight capabilities. The almost 1-tonne vehicle engaged in take-off, travel, and landing procedures within its guideway.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Lithium Ion batteries in cars and supercharger networks could be just transition technologies as more companies experiment with new ways to charge your EV’s wherever they are.

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If one of your worries is the range on your new electric vehicle then you’ll be glad to know that asides from solar vehicles with an almost unlimited range and supercharger networks springing up everywhere, that there’s a new tried and tested technology in town that will make sure your car never runs out of juice after the world’s fifth largest automaker built and tested a Charge as you-Drive System. In other words a loop of road in Italy with wireless EV charging coils embedded under its surface so that electric cars can charge as they drive around it and unlock unlimited range, similar to the ones I’ve seen being developed in Michigan and elsewhere.

Stellantis, parent company of Fiat, Chrysler, Dodge, Chrysler, Jeep, Opel, Peugeot, Ram, Maserati and many others, is a founding member of the Arena Del Futuro project in Chiari, a 1,050-meter (0.65-mile) loop of road near the Chiari exit of the A35 Motorway, about half an hour outside Milan in northern Italy. This “Arena of the Future” was built to test a number of forward looking transport technologies, including advanced 5G connectivity and IoT innovations, V2X communications and other technologies such as peer to peer vehicle charging.

The Future of Mobility, by keynote speaker Matthew Griffin

Its primary goal though was to test and prove the capabilities of wireless road charging systems like Stellantis’s Dynamic Wireless Power Transfer (DWTP) technology. To install the DWTP, some small grooves need to be cut into the road surface, so that a series of flattish inductive charging coils can be laid down and connected to a power supply. Then, asphalt is poured back over the top.

When active, the coils send power to vehicles passing overhead, provided that they’ve been fitted with a receiver. Interestingly, at this stage it appears the energy is sent straight to the car’s electric motor, so rather than charging up the battery the DWTP system simply takes over supplying energy, so that EVs above can cruise along at highway speeds without burning any battery.

See how they lay the new road

Initial tests are complete, and Stellantis says the power transfer efficiency is “comparable to the typical efficiency of fast charging stations.” The magnetic fields involved, says the company, have “no impact on the driver and passengers,” and are safe for pedestrians to walk through. Running on DC means the DWTP can use relatively thin, compact cabling, and it can also be directly and efficiently connected to renewable energy sources without the need to convert back and forth from AC.

So it can be done, and it works. But there’s no word on whether, or when, the DWTP system will be rolled out on public roadways because getting a project like this off the ground at commercial scale poses a series of chicken-and-egg problems, and may well end up costing more than it can bring the company back in revenue. These things will only make sense if they’re rolled out on very long stretches of high traffic highway, if drivers can be accurately billed for their use, and if enough people buy compatible cars to make them worthwhile.

So positive test results aside, it seems we’re still several expensive leaps of faith away from seeing in-road charging become commonplace. Stellantis says the technology “attracts interest for commercial development globally,” since it can also be built into static EV charge stations, parking lots, airports and the like, but there’s nothing concrete announced as yet.

Check out the video, which shows how they lay this stuff down.

Source: Stellantis

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Beaming electricity means you don’t need energy infrastructure and has lots of benefits, this was a ground breaking test.

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In what it describes as the most significant demonstration of its kind in half a century and a world first the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has beamed 1.6 kW of power over a kilometer (3,280 ft) using a microwave beam at the US Army Research Field in Maryland. And it’s part of a growing trend of developing and scaling increasingly powerful wireless energy transmission systems that can beam energy across mountain ranges and from outer space to power everything from cities to drones and military hardware.

The idea of transmitting power over long distances without wires has been around for well over a century. By the 1970s, the technology was mature enough to make it a key component in a concept by American physicist Gerard K. O’Neil that proposed establishing space colonies to build huge solar collector stations to beam power back to Earth – something that’s now happening.

The Future of Energy 2050, by Keynote Speaker Matthew Griffin

The principle is simple enough. Electricity is converted to microwaves, which are then focused in a tight beam at a receiver made up of what are called rectenna elements. These are very simple components that consist of an x-band dipole antenna with an RF diode. When microwaves strike the rectenna, the elements generate DC current.

Despite initial doubts, microwave beaming turns out to be surprisingly efficient and the NRL team led by Christopher Rodenbeck, Head of the Advanced Concepts Group, has been tasked by the Defense Department with developing the Safe and Continuous Power bEaming – Microwave (SCOPE-M) project to explore the practicality of fielding the technology.

See it in action

Using a 10-GHz microwave beam, SCOPE-M set up at two locations. The first was the US Army Research Field at Blossom Point, Maryland, and the second was at the Haystack Ultra Wideband Satellite Imaging Radar (HUSIR) transmitter at MIT in Massachusetts. The frequency was chosen because it was not only able to beam even in heavy rain with a loss of power of under five percent, it’s also safe to use under international standards in the presence of birds, animals, and people. This means the system doesn’t need the automatic cutouts developed for earlier laser-based systems.

In the Maryland tests, the beam operated at an efficiency of 60 percent. The Massachusetts test didn’t reach the same power peak, but had a higher average power level, so more energy was delivered.

The SCOPE-M technology could one day be used to transmit power on Earth or from large orbital solar power stations to provide electricity to the national grids 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. However, a more immediate application that the DOD is interested in is to beam power directly to troops in the field, eliminating the need for vulnerable and expensive fuel shipments.

“Although SCOPE-M was a terrestrial power beaming link, it was a good proof of concept for a space power beaming link,” said Brian Tierney, SCOPE-M electronics engineer. “The main benefit of space to Earth power beaming for the DOD is to mitigate the reliance on the fuel supply for troops, which can be vulnerable to attack.”

Source: NRL

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Wirelessly charging your smartphone is easy, but wirelessly charging an electric train moving at over 600kmh is an entirely different proposition.

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Like most smartphones today in the future almost everything will be wirelessly powered including cars and roads. However, while wirelessly charging your phone is easy, wirelessly charging a high speed maglev train is an entirely different challenge. However, with ambitions to be a transportation superpower, and in a world first a team of Chinese researchers have announced that they’ve developed a wireless power transfer system for maglev trains and managed to pull off what many people thought was impossible with current tech, with a high-speed prototype reaching unprecedented efficiency during a test run, according to researchers involved in the project.

The energy efficiency of a typical smartphone wireless charger is around 50 per cent. When charging a moving electric car with roadside transmitters, even more of the energy – nearly 80 per cent – is wasted, according to recent experiments.

But a maglev train in Qingdao, in China’s eastern Shandong province, designed to travel at a top speed of 600km/h (372mph) while being elevated by magnetic force, could draw powerful electricity from transmitting coils on the rail with up to 92.4 per cent efficiency.

The experimental results suggested that the wireless power transmission technology, based on extensive research and experiments by scientists and engineers around the world over the past few decades, was now “feasible for rail transport”, said lead project scientist Wu Donghua, of the CRRC Qingdao Sifang company, this month in a paper published in the Journal of Southwest Jiaotong University, a Chinese language peer-reviewed publication.

Power supply has been a major technological challenge in high-speed maglev technology.

Although the train is driven forward by magnetic force, much of the equipment on board requires electricity. A battery is deemed too big and heavy as a power source and wires are unable to withstand the heat and wear generated by contact with power lines at extreme speeds.

A linear motor, a traditional wireless supply method used in Japanese and German maglev trains, can produce electricity at high speed by harvesting energy directly from the magnetic driving force. But electric turbulence occurring in the narrow gap between the train and rail could reduce the efficiency of power transmission more than 50 per cent, according to some estimates. When the train stops at a station, the linear motor cannot generate any electricity.

The wireless power transmission system developed by Wu’s team can be compared to an induction stove.

Their system is designed to convert direct electrical current into a magnetic field with copper coils attached to the side of a rail. When the train passes over the charged coils, an antenna at its bottom cuts through the magnetic field and produces electricity in the physical process of induction. But getting the idea to work in real life was not easy because the additional magnetic field could interfere with the magnetic force driving the train forward.

A significant proportion of the magnetic energy could also leak into the environment, cutting its overall efficiency. To overcome these obstacles, Wu and his colleagues said they focused on some of the smaller details that were often neglected, such as the wiring method of the transmitting coil and the shape of the receiving antenna, and came up with designs never attempted before.

Their new technology could supply more than 170 kilowatts of power to the train at all speeds, exceeding the requirements of the electronic hardware on the single-car prototype.

“This efficiency is incredible,” said a Chongqing University researcher studying the application of wireless power transmission in transport. “It can be achieved in a wireless charging experiment for electric cars, but that’s under the most favourable conditions in a laboratory, and when the car is not moving at all,” said the researcher who asked not to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the media.

The difficulty in charging a train travelling at 600km/h lies in powering up the coil, which would take at least a second. One coil unit developed by Wu’s team was more than 20 metres (65 feet) long, and the train would pass it in less than the blink of an eye.

The Chongqing-based researcher said the proposed technology would require an extremely powerful and precise control system to switch the coils on just before the train arrived and then off after the train passed or overall efficiency would be significantly reduced. And because of a gap between the coils, the train would also need an extremely powerful energy management system to ensure a continuous, stable supply, he added.

The idea of wireless power transfer has been around for more than a century, and China is a latecomer to the field but in recent years the government has invested a significant amount in developing the technology.

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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

In the future EV’s will be wirelessly charged, and might not even need batteries.

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Michigan was one of the first states to approve the use of self-driving vehicles on its public roads, and now they’ve planning to build the first public road in the US where electric vehicles can charge wirelessly while driving, Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced Tuesday at the Motor Bella auto show in Pontiac.

“Michigan was home to the first mile of paved road, and now we’re paving the way for the roads of tomorrow with innovative infrastructure that will support the economy and the environment, helping us achieve our goal of carbon neutrality by 2050,” Whitmer said in a statement.

Next week, the state Department of Transportation will issue a formal request for proposals to design, test, and implement wireless charging infrastructure on one mile of road in Wayne, Oakland, or Macomb counties. It’s not yet clear how the Inductive Vehicle Charging Pilot would operate or when it would be unveiled.

Meanwhile, elsewhere a research project in Indiana will use magnetizable concrete to allow wireless charging on a quarter-mile stretch of private road. Coils embedded in the road will convey electricity to cars outfitted with coils of their own, operating much like the wireless charging pads used to juice up smartphones. Wireless charging technology has also already been tested in France, Sweden, and elsewhere. When scaled up, it could accelerate EV adoption by making it easier for drivers to recharge – as well as in time eliminating the need to charge and plug into supercharger networks forever.

The Indiana project will begin testing on a public road in one to two years, Scott Manning, an Indiana Department of Transportation spokesperson, told the Detroit Free Press. The Michigan proposal will begin with the public road phase.

“We’re in the midst of the most significant shift in the automotive industry since the Model T rolled off the assembly line more than a century ago,” Trevor Pawl, Chief Mobility Officer with Michigan’s Office of Future Mobility and Electrification, said in a statement. “This electrified roadway has the potential to accelerate autonomous vehicles at scale and turn our streets into safe, sustainable, accessible and shared transportation platforms.”

The post Michigan to build America’s first wireless electric vehicle charging road appeared first on 311 Institute.

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Electric vehicles won’t always have batteries – and this is where we begin.

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Even the most extended range electric cars can be a real pain to charge. The amount of time it takes to replenish battery power is still far greater than the time it takes to refill a fuel tank – although several new EVs are getting closer and there are now both batteryless cars and commercial solar powered cars, as well as batteries that can charge in seconds are already being developed and sold.

Now though the state of Michigan, which was the first state to allow driverless vehicles on its roads in the USA back in the day, will become the latest state to try and remedy the issue after Governor Gretchen Whitmer opened the Motor Bella auto show in Pontiac, MI, yesterday, announcing that the state would begin testing wireless charging roadways. The state joins Indiana and several international organisations, including governments, with similar plans as well some other startups who, in some cases, have opted to use magnetised  roads to charge EV’s and even gotten cars to wirelessly charge one another.

Whitmer said that a one mile stretch of road would be chosen for the Inductive Vehicle Charging Pilot, but it’s not clear where it will be yet.  Earlier this year, the Indiana Department of Transportation also announced that it would begin testing wireless charging highway pavement.

The tests will take place in phases, beginning with testing and validation of different types of roadways.  Phase three is when actual testing starts, though the location and timeframe are not yet defined.

The Michigan plan would move the state ahead of Indiana by going directly to the road test phase. Other tests are underway, or will soon be underway, in Israel and Norway. But one big question is implementation.

It’s not possible to plug in a car while driving, so both the car and the road surface would have to be capable of wireless charging, and while there are some cars and vans capable of this already there obviously aren’t very many of them. Given time though, and with the right amount of investment in wireless charging infrastructure and systems, needless to say wirelessly charged electric vehicles could one day become the norm – like our wirelessly charged smart devices. And, as more vehicles adopt the technology and become more efficient, a charging highway could be a massive step forward for charging times and range anxiety issues.

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