GM investing in PowerMat, hoping for wireless charging for the Volt

prizrak

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engadget said:
GM may have filed for bankruptcy back in 2009, but a lot has changed since then. GM's venture branch now apparently has enough cash in the bank to drop five million on a multi-year commercial deal for Powermat's wireless charging technology. The terms of the deal give GM the option to convert their investment into an equity stake within the first six months and provide GM exclusive use of Powermat's technology for one year in vehicles worldwide. Subsequently, the Volt is slotted to be one of the first vehicles receiving the new tech and a prototype version with charging mats in the front consoles and back seat will be shown this year at CES. However, the automaker is unsure as to what other models will receive Powermat upgrades. Micky Bly, leader of GM's electric car development efforts, stated though that initial tests did not reveal any significant issues with porting the technology into vehicles, leading GM to shoot for launching commercial integrations sometime in 2012. The automaker hasn't forgotten its an investor however and hopes other manufacturers will join the wireless charging bandwagon to help drive down costs after their exclusive buffer ends.
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Not a bad idea IMO. I considered power mats for my phones but due to the fact that I would have to use a special and a fairly bulky case I decided against it. In a car thats already fairly large it works pretty well.
 
Are you under the impression that the Powermat system will charge the car itself? The way I read that was that the car will have Powermat stations inside the car for powering devices and would still need that extra bulk added to the device. Can't say I'm that excited about it unless they have a good way to secure the device, since an ipod or cell phone flying off the dash and hitting you in the head doesn't sound that great to me.
 
Ans of course they go with the proprietary technology instead of the wireless charging standard, which can be built right in to future devices ala Palm Pre.
 
Are you under the impression that the Powermat system will charge the car itself? The way I read that was that the car will have Powermat stations inside the car for powering devices and would still need that extra bulk added to the device. Can't say I'm that excited about it unless they have a good way to secure the device, since an ipod or cell phone flying off the dash and hitting you in the head doesn't sound that great to me.

Yep looks like I misread it, I understood it as the car being charged wirelessly.

It makes even less sense if you consider that most people these days want smartphone/ipod integration in the head unit to play their music and such, which in turn would still charge them...
Ans of course they go with the proprietary technology instead of the wireless charging standard, which can be built right in to future devices ala Palm Pre.
Otherwise they couldn't have an exclusive deal, makes sense to me.
 
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Man...I was hoping for a giant tesla coil that charges the car remotely from miles away :(
 
Man...I was hoping for a giant tesla coil that charges the car remotely from miles away :(

hahahaa......as a Lighting Designer and Tech, I've wanted wireless power for a long time too. It would make setting up lighting systems a ton easier. You just have to make sure you get the addressing right, since it would be bad to send power to the wrong place...

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I like the idea, at the very least it means that you could run up to someone's house if your phone was running out of charge. I can see it being tricky though, how do you get an inductive system to delivery the voltage and current without frying everything close by? How would they stop a normal PowerMat phone thing being overcharged and blowing up if you walked past it to get to the car?
 
hahahaa......as a Lighting Designer and Tech, I've wanted wireless power for a long time too. It would make setting up lighting systems a ton easier. You just have to make sure you get the addressing right, since it would be bad to send power to the wrong place...

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Can you PM me with more information on this? I've always been fascinated with wireless power transmission, but never fully understood it.
 
I've always wondered which would come first, safe wireless power, or batteries/power storage that last the lifetime of their respective devices.
 
Can you PM me with more information on this? I've always been fascinated with wireless power transmission, but never fully understood it.

Nope....as far as I know there is no way to really do this safely and reliably. Your idea with the Tesla coil is about as close as it gets. Tesla did manage to provide power to flourescent fixtures this way, and even over miles of distance, but the tesla coil had to be huge. The largest one ever created was made by Tesla himself and was in Colorado Springs and could evidently produce detectable electrical charge up to 25 miles away.

At the end of the day, its not really useful in the real world. It spreads electricity in a very broad nature, and lacks the ability to direct it to a single place. I don't think that electronics get along well. The cool thing is, you don't necessarily need the "lighting bolt" effect to get power to the devices. Tesla wanted to make ginormous Tesla coils that would transmit electricity world wide without cables and wires. I doubt it will ever happen though, since it would take a complete 180 with how electrical devices work. I'm no electrical engineer, but I suspect it could possibly come into play with "electric highways" since most electric cars use DC power, which is what a Tesla coil transmits. Not sure though.

I know for my industry, most of the complexity of our lighting systems are restriced largely by having to run multiple cables to each lighting fixture, loud speaker, projector or any other electrical device. There is a certain amount of loop through stuff you can do, but at the end of the day a large amount of the weight is taken up with cables. If all i had to do was throw a light on a piece of truss, turn it on, and address it, then it would make for a much much much easier and faster setup. Next time you are at a big concert, actually check out how many cables you actually see.
 
A wireless charging system that is powerful enough to charge a car at a decent rate would either jam all wireless communications in the area or have other deleterious health effects.
 
I'm no electrical engineer, but I suspect it could possibly come into play with "electric highways" since most electric cars use DC power, which is what a Tesla coil transmits. Not sure though.
Wouldn't really work that way, you can have an induction coil under the road for that, there is a train in Korea (I think it was Korea) that works on that principle.
A wireless charging system that is powerful enough to charge a car at a decent rate would either jam all wireless communications in the area or have other deleterious health effects.
For one, I failed at reading, they are just putting power mats inside of the cars :)

For two, not at all. It doesn't have to charge the car quickly at all, this would be a device you put in your garage or something similar in order to keep the car charged overnight. The way I would design such a device would be similar to these power toothbrushes that they sell. Basically something that would require extreme proximity, so the device could be mounted in the floor of the garage closer to the back and would only activate when it detects your car over it and all the doors are closed, the inside of the garage can be made shielded. It would make it easier to live with the car since it would not require that you remember to plug/unplug it when you get home/leave. This would also simplify a design for induction highways since the receiver would be on the bottom and a car is easily enough shielded from any possible radiation.
 
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For two, not at all. It doesn't have to charge the car quickly at all, this would be a device you put in your garage or something similar in order to keep the car charged overnight. The way I would design such a device would be similar to these power toothbrushes that they sell. Basically something that would require extreme proximity, so the device could be mounted in the floor of the garage closer to the back and would only activate when it detects your car over it and all the doors are closed, the inside of the garage can be made shielded. It would make it easier to live with the car since it would not require that you remember to plug/unplug it when you get home/leave. This would also simplify a design for induction highways since the receiver would be on the bottom and a car is easily enough shielded from any possible radiation.

But the transmitter wouldn't be shielded, especially not on highways. Suggest you check health effects of powerful magnetic fields, as well as the effect they have on wireless comm and magnetic media. Not to mention medical appliances.

Powermat users sometimes report that their phones and other devices using the system often have wireless interference or simply can't use wireless communication at all. Now, imagine a city blanketed in the things.
 

No it was a much less elaborate, it was a train that runs on a regular road with regular tires.
But the transmitter wouldn't be shielded, especially not on highways. Suggest you check health effects of powerful magnetic fields, as well as the effect they have on wireless comm and magnetic media. Not to mention medical appliances.

Powermat users sometimes report that their phones and other devices using the system often have wireless interference or simply can't use wireless communication at all. Now, imagine a city blanketed in the things.
I'm aware of all of those, except the powermat issue. What I want to know though is how far from the mat do they actually get that interference and also if the fields from induction highways would really go far enough to cause any issues. Magnetic fields do tend to dissipate fairly quickly, I mean look at MRI machines they are not pulling stuff from all over the hospital when on.

I understand that a highway induction coil would have to be very powerful but I do have to question how far the effects of the field would actually extend. There are also plenty of sparsely populated areas where this could work better. For instance interstate highways with huge areas of largely empty land, especially out West.
 
MRIs are often separated from anything else important by several meters. The periphery of the MRI's effective field is denoted by the usual warning signs. As a specific case, the German Philips 4.0T system has a 5-gauss line (I.E., minimum safety perimeter for the general populace) of 16 meters horizontal radius around the machine and a 21 meter vertical radius. Later ones use smaller and less powerful magnets, but they still require a relatively wide berth.

Also, pacemakers would be a problem in this scenario. There is nowhere in a vehicle that you can get far enough away that the field from the road feed won't mess with it.
 
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