EdEarl Posted April 30, 2016 Posted April 30, 2016 Phys.org: Radio waves not battery fire up WISP, future seen in constructionNASA flew a solar powered plane. Is it possible to reap enough EMF from the environment to power a drone? If not, surely a control station with directional antenna could be used to send a beam of modulated EM energy. Such a system could hover indefinitely. Hast it been done or is someone working on it?
fiveworlds Posted April 30, 2016 Posted April 30, 2016 Isn't there solar powered drones already though?
EdEarl Posted April 30, 2016 Author Posted April 30, 2016 (edited) Isn't there solar powered drones already though? Experimental, yes. http://www.newsweek.com/google-tests-solar-powered-internet-drones-421561 Commercial? Solar doesn't work at night, and batteries are heavy ATM. Lithium air batteries might make them more practical. There's lots of EM at night, but not much light. An EM powered drone might trail a nanotube antenna. Edited April 30, 2016 by EdEarl
BlueVictor15 Posted May 2, 2016 Posted May 2, 2016 It is certainly possible to power such a plane with EMF. Otherwise, the plane or the system is poorly constructed.
EdEarl Posted May 2, 2016 Author Posted May 2, 2016 @Blue Do you know of a database of EMF energy vs location on Earth?
swansont Posted May 3, 2016 Posted May 3, 2016 WISP is not a drone. The power to fly something is likely many orders of magnitude larger than what they were doing, and if they were powering from something like an RFID reader, they were not drawing it from the environment. Ambient EM waves are going to be spread out over their spectrum, as opposed to a resonant system designed to transmit and receive a certain frequency. I have a mini-drone that needs to be used indoors because it can't deal with much wind. 150 mAh battery at 3.7 V, and lasts 10-20 minutes. So that's ~200 mW of power to fly something with no payload. WISP runs on ~100 microwatts, or three orders of magnitude less. https://wisp.wikispaces.com/ManagingPower
EdEarl Posted May 3, 2016 Author Posted May 3, 2016 A bigger antenna can collect more, but 100 micro watts should be enough if the drone is around 0.02 gram. Otherwise, it would be necessary to beam energy to the drone, maybe as big as a butterfly.
swansont Posted May 3, 2016 Posted May 3, 2016 A bigger antenna can collect more, but 100 micro watts should be enough if the drone is around 0.02 gram. Otherwise, it would be necessary to beam energy to the drone, maybe as big as a butterfly. Which is lighter than any drone built (and those aren't autonomous), and antennas have mass.
Enthalpy Posted June 13, 2016 Posted June 13, 2016 Unintentional existing EMF won't suffice for sure. From a dipole, you get -60dBm (=1nW), in altitude maybe -40dBm, from the FM and TV bands. But radio beams from the ground have already powered aircraft, some two decades ago. The goal was to keep the craft airborne indefinitely in the lower stratosphere and use it as a broadcast antenna. I don't know what happens in a jet stream. Then, one has to ask whether the huge-power ground station is any cheaper than gasoline and a second aircraft.
swansont Posted June 13, 2016 Posted June 13, 2016 But radio beams from the ground have already powered aircraft, some two decades ago. Citation/link, please.
Mike Smith Cosmos Posted June 13, 2016 Posted June 13, 2016 (edited) Could my "Suns radiation conversion project " , not come into its own , on such a project . Radiation conversion project :- Link :- http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/89737-worlds-energy-requirements-may-be-within-our-technological-grasp/page-2#entry873880 Drawing of system dish :- http://www.scienceforums.net/uploads/monthly_06_2015/post-33514-0-57660900-1435694901.jpg Mike Edited June 13, 2016 by Mike Smith Cosmos
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