Circa 2014 o,.o.
Two issues preventing the widespread uptake of electric vehicles are recharging time and lack of range. Now, scientists have shown one potential means of negating these issues. Their demonstration of electric power transfer via the car-wheel is claimed as the world’s first.
Electric vehicles can already be powered via infrastructure in the road. The South Korean city of Gumi uses a means of electromagnetic induction to power some of its buses. This newly-demonstrated method, however, uses radio frequency transmission.
The concept has been developed by Masahiro Hanazawa of Toyota Central R&D Labs and Takashi Ohira of Toyohashi University of Technology. It avoids the need for potentially dangerous contact conductivity devices by up-converting energy from power lines into radio frequency using high-speed inverters.