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Siemens and BMW Introduced New Wireless EV Chargers at This Year's Hannover Messe

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Maybe more people would tap into this electric car trend if better and more widespread equipment would be made available to them. For example, right now drivers have a difficult time finding a facility to charge their electric cars and if they do, they have to use a cable for that. With Siemens and BMW working on the case, this will no longer be a fact.

The German company was again present this year at the famous technology event Hannover Messe, this time to introduce the public to its new inductive charging project. It is a “no touch” technology that works like this: the driver pulls in at the charging station, which by the way can be fitted into nearly any setting and is connected underground to the public grid.

This connection is being made through a primary coil. Within a maximum distance of 15 centimeters from this one, a second coil is attached to the car. An electric current starts to flow towards the primary coil once the driver activates the charge. A magnetic field is then created, which induces the electricity in the secondary coil and tha’s it: the battery is recharged.

The electricity flows from the grid to the battery at an efficiency of more than 90%. For those of you worrying about getting electrocuted during the process, you shouldn’t: the magnetic field doesn’t exceed the area between the two coils, and even so you have a magnetic field surrounding the vehicle a lot less than the ideal international limit of 6.25 microteslas.

Later this May, only a 3.6  kW prototype will be tested, and in June the project will go out on the streets of Berlin: the goal is to see if the system behaves well in real-life conditions and people are satisfied with it.

If you’re still not persuaded about this system’s efficiency, there’s one more tip for you: the stations use excess clean energy from solar and wind sources, so there are no worries about more pollution or even misdirecting the precious clean energy obtained.

[via Siemens]

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2 COMMENTS

  1. I don’t understand effort on such technology. Effectiveness of wireless transport will not exceed 80%. Considering future planned quantity of EV, this will cause a big waste of EE. More effective (maybe cheaper, as well) could be any kind of automatic mechanism, which will connect EE to EV unattended while parking.

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