In order to make the impact on the vehicle's efficiency small, you sacrifice the amount of energy you can capture per unit foot of roadway. So in order to capture really useful amounts of energy, you need lots of piezo collectors, and a lot of wiring. Your infrastructure costs are significant.
Further, in order to "capture some of the energy now lost in flexing the roadbed" you would need to make stiffer roads. Concrete has a high compressive strength, on the order of 8-10,000psi. The compacted sand and gravel substrate beneath, not so much. There's where your road flexes. So to stiffen the road, pour more concrete. Currently, we're coming up on a worldwide cement shortage, raising construction prices substantially. Good sand is also growing short, necessitating more costly aggregate and fill materials. This is the background against which you must measure the additional cost of any energy collection system. We won't discuss the "squishy" character of asphalt and the near-impossibility of capturing that energy -- basically new road construction methods and materials are needed to provide a minimally-flexing substrate for your energy-collection layer to function at its best. Theoretically, there might be some energy to be gained there. Practically, it looks like it would substantially increase the cost of road construction. And here in Ohio, where "road construction" is one of the seasons of our year, the cost of both initial construction and especially repairs would be more than is politically affordable. The Highway Trust Fund is pretty tapped out now. Cal Frye > *From:* Jack Wendel via EV <ev@lists.evdl.org> > *Date:* August 28, 2016 at 7:13 PM > *To:* Cor van de Water <cwa...@proxim.com>, Electric Vehicle > Discussion List <ev@lists.evdl.org> > *Subject:* [EVDL] Piezo-power> 10mi of freeway could charge all the > EVs in Burbank-CA(?) > [...back of the envelope calculations, etc...] > > In conclusion, I am not expecting "free energy". My only hope is that the > gains offset the losses and infrastructure, distribution and maintenance > costs. And I simply cannot form a conclusion on that without more data. And > more data cannot be gathered if the idea is dismissed without further > investigation, research and experimentation. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20160829/f4169e44/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Read EVAngel's EV News at http://evdl.org/evln/ Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
