The Central Florida Expressway is teaming up the ASPIRE Engineering Research Center at USU and Norwegian agency Evolgy to build an electrified roadway close to Orlando. (Image Credit: Evolgy)
LOGAN – Utah State University’s ASPIRE Research Center is teaming with the Central Florida Expressway Authority and the Norwegian agency Evolgy to build an electrified roadway in central Florida.
Tallis Blalack, Managing Director of ASPIRE, stated the middle is devoted to advancing sustainable electrified transportation by wi-fi charging capabilities as vehicles drive over electrical coils embedded in the roadway.
“We can charge a semi doing 70 miles an hour down a highway, or a car or a passenger van, just the same way you can charge an electric toothbrush when you put it in its holder, or you can charge a phone when you put it on a little wireless charger,” Blalack stated. “We can do the same thing with vehicles traveling at speed. It just means it’s at higher power and a far more complex system.”
Blalack stated this know-how can cut back prices by discovering higher choices than a 500-mile battery for an enormous semi, which prices $150,000 and weighs 20,000 kilos.
“If we can have them charged, while they’re driving across the interstate highways, we can then shrink that to a 50-mile battery, which is what they need when they get off the highway and go to the distribution center,” Blalack defined. “They depart their container there, they decide up a brand new one and get again on the highway.
“We can cut that $150,000 cost down to $15,000 and we can take the weight from 20,000 pounds down to 2,000 pounds, which is about the weight you’d have for a fully loaded semi with tanks of diesel. Then you can put the same amount of cargo in those trucks.”
USU’s ASPIRE Engineering Research Center was launched in September, 2020 with a $50 million /10 yr grant from the National Science Foundation, to help widespread adoption of electrical transportation.