Comment by jauntywundrkind a day ago
The application to drones seems most clear: beam drones some extra power as needed. Or continually!
I wonder how big that receiving apparatus is. Whether the receiver is gimballed, or whether the drone itself has to fly a heading to aim at the sender: TBD.
if you are the military and you are using drones to win a war, I don't think birds are your primary concern tho
Last time I forgot sunscreen at a UV index of 10 my skin started peeling of after half an hour so...
Why not just beam power down the optical fiber? Optical fiber is exceptionally clear and works in fog and rain
Fiber transmits light, not rf. To get power out of fiber optics you have to have a photovoltaic cell on the other side and there's a limit for how much those can produce with such a collaminated light source.
Using fiber optics for power is like trying to make a solar panel generate electricity from a laser beam.
just have a tiny steam turbine equivalent...? (some thermoelectric generator) You don't really need to be efficient. You have fans to blow air and dissipate heat on the other end after all
I have no idea why this might be limited by the light source being collimated?
I mean, you can get electricity from PV illuminated by a laser, and everything I've heard so far says it's easier than with sunlight because you can match the frequency of the laser to the band gap of the PV.
Sure, you absolutely can do it. But material science quickly becomes a major limit.
For something 15% efficient like a high quality PV cell, for every 100 watts you want to be usable on the receiving side, the receiver has to bleed off 566 watts of heat. And that's 566 watts of waste heat that is highly concentrated.
Consider a single residental power circuit. 12A maximum, 120v, that's 1440 watts at delivery. For PV power delivery via laser, that PV would need to dissipate 8 kilowatts of waste heat. One a very small surface
How about drones with a solar panel case? Would require a sunny day to work at all though.
Tiny nuclear reactor?
While not reactors, how about nuclear batteries without heavy shielding?
And have a great opportunity to drill some holes in birds heads.
Sorry I really fail to recognise how beaming 1kw of excited particles is a safe thing to do just like this…