Wireless Power? (The work of Nikola Tesla)

[sophiecentaur]

Good time to all :)
I'm not a physicist, I am a chemical engineer but I like to complicate my life. I have a natural facility to find correlations between things but sometimes takes me long.
I hope someone can help me with the following questions:
We all know that we get from the sun huge amounts of energy.
1. Why built solar panels to capture and use a small fraction of the energy from the sun?
As far as my knowledge reach, the solar panels only work with photons.
2. Why not make panels that can collect and use all the solar wind?
3. Is possible to collect all the radiation that comes from the sun in a disorderly way and rectify (as is done with laser light) all the energy for our everyday use?
I know that getting energy from nowhere is not possible because this violates the second law. But, it is possible to collect the energy from the high energy oval belt that circles the Earth at 8 cicles / second.
4. Why no one have been manufactured these energy collectors?

Thanks, Ivan Castilla

The most efficient PV cells are about 40% efficient. That's not bad, although it only means the efficiency when the cell is actually pointed directly at the Sun. It's dark for half the time on average and, even in the day, the angle is only right for a short time. Actually, even that isn't bad. But what do we actually mean by "efficiency" in the context of renewables? There's as much 'Sunlight' available as we want as long as we are prepared to use bigger and bigger collecting areas so it's not strictly a relevant factor (unlike the efficiency of a petrol engine or domestic heating system for which the energy supply itself is limited).
All electromagnetic waves consist of 'photons' and there is no other source of energy from the Sun that's of any consequence (The solar wind that you quote is extremely low power (1/100) of the EM radiation from the Sun.
If you wanted to make use of other parts of the solar EM spectrum, you would need the 'collector' to be co-sited with the PV array - or you may as well use two PV arrays for most purposes.
There are some instances where thermal collection is better value than PV - water heating at low latitudes is a good, established system but doesn't work so well at 50°N.

You mention Laser light. This is coherent and could be 'harvested' more efficiently but Sunlight is non coherent so those techniques are not relevant.

Every so often, there are suggestions for gathering solar energy with satellites and 'beaming' the energy down. You need to bear in mind that launching tons of satellite is, and probably always will be, pretty expensive and that converting the gathered power into a form that could actually be beamed to Earth and then re-converting to 'mains electricity' would hardly be very efficient, overall. My original point about the fact that there is no practical limit to the available area for gathering solar power down here is very relevant to this. Terrestrial technologies will always be a lot cheaper to build, deploy and repair than space-born systems.
Until the population is so dense that we are standing shoulder to shoulder on the surface of Earth, I don't think we will need to be gathering our everyday energy from space-born equipment.

I'm afraid that the least sexy way of dealing with our energy shortage is just to use less of it. That doesn't appeal to techies or to politicians and economists, who want grOWTH. I'm sure it's the way forward. Thick jumpers from now on... and walking to work.

 

[IvCastilla]

Thank you, I wrote you a reply during 3 times and when I send, this become lost because they ask me for a login. Is really crazy.

 

[Ka-KoolKid]

Hey I couldn't help but to skip from 3rd page of this thread to the end. It's kind of bugging me that people don't believe this wireless Tesla stuff doesn't work when it has been proven and replicated (myself included). It only bugs me because I want help for certain things but no one can help me because they don't believe it works. I don't think the guy who started this thread fully understands how it works either. Now, I will admit there is ONE claim regarding wireless transfer (or more appropriately 'single wire transmission) that may be incorrect and yet to be proven. The claim is that it works using longitudinal scalar waves.

I will explain how I believe it works without the claim of scalar waves because of what I tested and it seems to me that there are no waves involved for the transmission of power.

Basically you have a "transmitting" tesla coil transformer. using the resonant frequency, one coil induces a current into the coil in series with the metal sphere of the tesla coil (lets call it the secondary). The other end of that secondary coil is a wire connected to another coil of the second tesla coil (reversely wounded but same number of turns and inductance) which is connected in series to another metal sphere. In turn the receiving tesla coil will induce a current in another coil (the secondary of the receiving tesla coil). Then you connect a load to it whatever you want it to be.

The reason the distance doesn't matter between the two tesla coils is either because of the scalar waves OR what I believe it to be as follows:

Since the two tesla coils are in resonance the electrons travel back and forth the two tesla coils and the metal sphere at the top of each coil acts as an 'electron sink'. You can call it a capacitor with one spherical plate if you will but that is getting to the math end of it. Logically I see it as a metal sphere with room for free electrons to travel in and out of it. Pretty much like two plated capacitor if you will but in this case we don't care about the electric field being emitted from the sphere, we just care about the empty spots in each outer shell of the atoms in the metal.

I hope that cleared things up. If you wish to replicate this work to prove it to yourself you can Google Steve Jackson plans for wireless energy. I copied his plans for replication and was satisfied with the results.

There is one more reason i disbelieve scalar waves and if you wish I could explain that too but let me know what you think of this technology so far.

 

[berkeman]

This thread has gone on long enough. Thread is now closed.