Putting 92kW in for a 47dBm over 1km is comedic levels of loss. It’d be more efficient to move a 2kW generator over and send several people on laps with pogo sticks carrying thimbles full of diesel to keep it running.
I all really tired of all the unicorn shit being shoveled in the wireless energy transfer research area.
1.6kw is enough to power a drone for example.
If the receiver is compact enough and light enough then this for examples allows you to have a drone orbiting a surface warship pretty much indefinitely.
Just so you know there is far greater loss of power in extracting oil, transporting it, refining it and then transporting the refined fuel to its destination.
But it’s still better than not bothering with all of that just because the fuel allows you to power up thing that otherwise you won’t be able to do so.
With some of the wideband phased array sensors out there now you can probably use the incident reflections off the drone to track the location of it as well.
It's just a monumentally stupid idea end to end.
Surface vessels already are lit like a pulsar due to their radar…
Civilian marine radars can easily reach upto 25kw.
The AN/SPY-1 which is the radar of the Aegis Combat System has a power output of 6MW….
It still lights you up like an xmas tree.
You also assume that the power delivery will be continuous instead of essentially just being used for charging a small UAV.
Every modern system we have is usually completely inefficient but the price of that efficiency allows you to do other things.
Our food production is extremely energy inefficient but it frees up the majority of the population to do other things, it improves sanitation in cities by pushing animal husbandry further out and it allows most of us to enjoy a wide selection of foods that taste good which has enormous societal benefits.
The fact that something is inefficient doesn’t make it useless or ineffective.
Heck sail ships are also far more energy efficient than airplanes but we kinda benefit greatly from being able to take off and land at any point on the planet within 24 hours or less.
but if you could put a serious loitering drone over a section of urban terrain in a conflict zone or in high crime area, that could move around to get angles as required, that would be cool
Having worked for defense technology contractors in the area, these people want ideas. They want brand-new, sci-fi level ideas. These militaries and defense companies will literally hire sci-fi writers for inspiration.
It's not like SV where the primary focus is profit. It's less limited than that, these researches are on the cutting edge, it's where we received the internet itself. Remember, researchers in this league led the use and development of radio in its early stages for military reasons.
The truth is, in order to attract defense funds, you have to oversell an idea way, way down the line. Imaginative people with bold ideas of the future. It's beyond market trends, publicly-funded technological development is pure and machine-like. Blows any selfish, boyhood fantasies of the world's richest men out of the water.
Having also worked for clearly larger and more respectable defence contractors, one of whom had a big stake in early radio, in an RF engineering capacity, this stuff is laughed off the table. No one really wants or needs this capability nor believes it will work. It’s fringe garbage.
Defence projects start with capabilities and then work out what you can deliver within those capabilities and client expectations.
Knowing when to tell the client they are lunatics rather than taking the money and dragging a project out while paying subcontractors is where things are divided in the market.
I worked on a huge project to beam power into the body, wirelessly, for an implanted blood pump /artificial heart.
It works for small amounts of power, like for pacemakers or nerve stimulators. But for any kind of real power, the power needed to move motors and do real work, it's just not feasible.
No matter what fancy math or physics you do, no matter if you work with a fancy tech firm that has decades of IP in this field and was founded to make this technology specifically (like wiitricity). None of those things changes the fundamental underlying physics. Energy in the EM spectrum decreases with the square of the distance, period.
If you need to beam a tenth of a watt one foot, that's possible, if you want to beam 10 watts 2 or 3 feet, that's possible (both with very large losses, 50% or more). Anything beyond this in distance or power is just wasting energy. It's like heating up 500 gallons of water, carrying it one mile and using the last 2 degrees of delta temperature left to do something. Instead it's far smarter to just take the 50 gallons of fuel one mile, heat the water there, and use its full energy.
Ten points for your brilliant description about efficiency, it beats my long technical diatribe by miles.
:-)
even at 2 km, a wireless drone with endless loiter time is awesome from some tactical applications
For instance, people cannot operate 100% of time. I know that there's been some research in eliminating the need for sleep, etc, but having watches worked for ages.
So no it is a silly idea.