Introduction
In order to be able to test the Tesla wireless system or Wireless Energy Transmission (WET), based on Tesla’s Us-patent-649621, Us-patent-645576 and Canadian-patent 142,352, Wi-tap made a few scaled down test set-ups. The first testing period is June-August 2015.
After playing around and adding small adjustments, this article presents the final results of this testing period. This report is a summary and the results of the tests are more detailed in our research papers. In time more details will be added to this article or on separate pages on this site.
The WET is intended to use alternating electrical Earth current between the transmitter Tesla Coil (or TxTC) and receiver Tesla Coil (or RxTC). In that case a very good Earth grounding system is required. In these first tests, for practical reasons, a copper electrical cable (virtual Earth) is connected between the ”cold” sides of the Tesla Coils (or TC for short) In the literature such a circuit is often referred to as a ‘single wire transmission’ circuit.
In the next test round, the Earth as conducting path will be tested. Therefore some set-up variations were tried out in this first testing period.
Goals
The main goal with these first tests is to transfer usable energy between the two TCs and get some understanding of the working mechanism. It’s possible that each ‘Tesla Coil’ is in reality a circuit, consisting of a coil and capacitor and the two circuits together form a parallel resonant circuit.
Simplified Setup
The two TCs resonate at around 1 MHz, 300 meters wavelength.
Testing
Tests were carried out at 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 meter distance between the TxTC and RxTC. And later also at 128 meter.
The power transfer efficiency, Eff% = (Pout/Pin)*100% was measured. The testing also included measuring the relation between distance and efficiency.
Set-up Variations
Also variations in the set-up were tested: Using a water bath in series with the artificial ground copper cable. Later a ‘water sand salt case’ in series was used. The idea was to get some insight in the next testing round with the Earth as conductor. At this moment we have no means to test the Earth as the conducting medium, it’s rocky here and Wi-Tap lacks the tools to implement a proper grounding.
Results
All experiments show that distance and output power are not directly related. Detected output power is +/- 60% of the input power and remains constant at all measured distances. There’s no attenuation of the system caused by increased distance.
Other experiments, conducted by Sacco & Tomilin, Handwerker and Meyl show like results, although with different power transfer efficiency values and shorter distances.
With the water bath or ‘water sand salt case’ in series, and a maximum distance of 4 meters between the TxTC and the RxTC, the measurements show the same general results, but with some additional losses.
Discussion
If the copper wire connection between the TC’s is a longitudinal path, the vibrating electrons and the corresponding magnetic fields in the copper wire have only freedom in 2 directions. The question is, how the WET system performs when the copper wire is substituted by Earth, the real proof of concept. The results so far, made Wi-Tap eager to go for the next test phase. Coming soon!
Some pictures of first model of our tesla coil. First picture is related to 64m test.