In this article on a robot winning a prize for climbing up a wire, simulating a space elevator, I was interested to read that the robot was powered from a ground based laser system and not, as I was expecting to see, a solar powered system. Although it did use solar panels to capture the laser light.
As the test took place in the Mojave desert, one of the areas identified as being able to get good sunlight for powering the planet, I would guess that it didn’t generate as much power using sunlight than it can using other forms of light. This brings up some interesting thoughts on power transfer.
In previous posts we surmised that to transfer power from solar arrays in space we would use microwaves. Now instead if we could put a satellite in orbit comprising just solar panels and a laser array and using the large surface area of the solar panels in space to generate a focused laser beam pointing down to Earth on to a much smaller solar panel receiver and therefore up the efficiency of both the collection and the transfer.
Of course there are many things that could go wrong here but I wonder what sort of power that would output. Of course it doesn’t have to be in space, even a high altitude balloon could do it.
The reason I was thinking about this is we have no, as far as I am aware, microwave weapons that work over any sort of distance but we do have experimental lasers in a flying 747 which is designed to shoot down aerial missiles. There must be a reason for that and I’m going with power at the receiving end.
But how does laser power actually compare to microwave power in power transfer efficiency and power generated per square inch? Anyone have any idea?
Efficiency is a highly developed form of laziness.
Laser power
In this article on a robot winning a prize for climbing up a wire, simulating a space elevator, I was interested to read that the robot was powered from a ground based laser system and not, as I was expecting to see, a solar powered system. Although it did use solar panels to capture the laser light.
As the test took place in the Mojave desert, one of the areas identified as being able to get good sunlight for powering the planet, I would guess that it didn’t generate as much power using sunlight than it can using other forms of light. This brings up some interesting thoughts on power transfer.
In previous posts we surmised that to transfer power from solar arrays in space we would use microwaves. Now instead if we could put a satellite in orbit comprising just solar panels and a laser array and using the large surface area of the solar panels in space to generate a focused laser beam pointing down to Earth on to a much smaller solar panel receiver and therefore up the efficiency of both the collection and the transfer.
Of course there are many things that could go wrong here but I wonder what sort of power that would output. Of course it doesn’t have to be in space, even a high altitude balloon could do it.
The reason I was thinking about this is we have no, as far as I am aware, microwave weapons that work over any sort of distance but we do have experimental lasers in a flying 747 which is designed to shoot down aerial missiles. There must be a reason for that and I’m going with power at the receiving end.
But how does laser power actually compare to microwave power in power transfer efficiency and power generated per square inch? Anyone have any idea?