“Detroit is now home to the country’s first stretch of road that can wirelessly charge an electric vehicle (EV), whether it’s parked or moving,” reports Axios. “Wireless charging on an electrified roadway could remove one of the biggest hassles of owning an EV: the need to stop and plug in regularly. Electrified roads could also be helpful in keeping electric buses, delivery vans, long-haul trucks and robotaxis operating around the clock.”
The wireless charge is the result of the recent installation of inductive-charging coils made by Israeli startup Electreon in a 0.3 mile section of 14th Street in Detroit. Over the next couple years, that section of road will be used to test and fine-tune Electreon’s wireless-charging technology in the real world before making it available elsewhere to motorists in the rest of the world.
Next year, Michigan will begin accepting bids to rebuild part of US Route 12 (Michigan Avenue), where additional inductive charging will be installed.
The concept is straightforward. When an electric car with an approved receiver nears the in-road charging segment, the road sends electricity wirelessly through a magnetic field to the vehicle’s battery. It does not matter whether the car is parked or driving. Either way, the car will charge if on the segment of road with charging coils.
It will not pose a safety hazard to motorists or pedestrians. They won’t get zapped if they come in contact with the pavement. Electreon’s wireless charging technology is already being tested in several cities in Israel, Europe, and China.
Roads may also soon be used as batteries. Science.org reports that “electrified cement could turn houses and roads into nearly limitless batteries,” making energy much cheaper and more plentiful:
Tesla’s Powerwall, a boxy, wall-mounted, lithium-ion battery, can power your home for half a day or so. But what if your home was the battery?
Researchers have come up with a new way to store electricity in cement, using cheap and abundant materials. If scaled up, the cement could hold enough energy in a home’s concrete foundation to fulfill its daily power needs. Scaled up further, electrified roadways could power electric cars as they drive. And if scientists can find a way to do this all cheaply the advance might offer a nearly limitless capacity for storing energy from intermittent renewable sources, such as solar and wind.
So far, the cement devices are small, only big enough to power a few LED lightbulbs. But efforts are already underway to scale them up. “It would be a very attractive technology if they can achieve that at a larger scale,” says Sang Nguyen, a mechanical engineer at Imperial College London who was not involved with the work.
The cement devices are a kind of simplified battery called supercapacitors. They consist of two electrically conductive plates separated by an ion-conducting electrolyte and a thin membrane. As the device is charged, positively charged ions from the electrolyte accumulate on one plate, while negatively charged ions accumulate on the other.
The amount of power storage depends on the total surface area of the supercapacitor’s conductive plates. For decades, researchers have tried to incorporate them into structural materials, such as the concrete used in roads and buildings, or the carbon composites used in automotive and aircraft bodies. Unlike today’s best batteries, supercapacitors typically use nonflammable electrolytes, making them safer.
The problem is that cement, a primary ingredient in concrete, is normally a poor electrical conductor. So, in recent years, several groups have made structural supercapacitors by spiking cement with highly conductive forms of carbon, such as graphene or carbon nanotubes. Although these perform well, the ingredients are expensive….In search of a cheaper alternative, Ulm and his colleagues turned to an age-old form of powdered carbon known as carbon black, which has been used since antiquity as a black pigment. Cheap and globally abundant, carbon black is also highly conductive.
Ulm and his team mixed a small percent of carbon black with cement powder and added water [and cut this wired cement into small plates and added a membrane and connected a wire to the plates]…
If carbon black cement was used to make a 45-cubic-meter volume of concrete—roughly the amount used in the foundation of a standard home—it could store 10 kilowatt-hours of energy, enough to power an average household for a day….If the same approach were used to build roads, parking lots, or driveways, electrified concrete could store renewable power and deliver it to electric cars via inductive chargers. One approach might be sending electricity to the underbellies of cars via copper coils embedded in the roadway—a bit like how wireless chargers charge smartphones. Such technology is already being developed in Germany and the Netherlands.
But there are considerable challenges to applying such technology, as the article explains at this link.
Scientists recently came up with a substance that whitens teeth and also kills 94% of bacteria. Scientists have also come up with a treatment for alcoholism that reduces drinking by 90% among the lab monkeys it was tested on.
Artificial intelligence is now developing highly-effective antibodies to fight disease. Doctors are using artificial intelligence to detect cases of breast cancer more effectively in Hungary, enabling them to remove such cancers before they can metastasize and kill women.
Robotics is fueling other life-saving innovations. Doctors recently did the first robotic liver transplant in America. Robots can fit in small spaces in people’s bodies that a surgeon can’t reach without cutting through living tissue, or doing other collateral damage.
In other news, a mutant tomato could save harvests around the world. Farmers have found they can increase crop yields by using electrical stimulation on their crops.
