Free Web NovelChapter 1337: Chapter 639: It’s Time to Open the Space Routes!_2
Space light energy transmission technology could be said to have remedied the shortcomings of electric vehicles.
That’s not to say that electric vehicle companies remain unaffected.
For instance, the most popular electric vehicle company internationally had an already inflated stock price. As the stock prices in the automotive industry fell, their shares plummeted by nearly fifty percent within a week, halving their market value, a decline even greater than some traditional fuel vehicle companies.
This was mainly because the battery sector was significantly impacted.
The financial effects brought by the latest technologies led to the steep fall of some industries while others saw substantial gains.
Such as solar panel companies.
And silicon materials.
The former is a key growth industry, with the market predicting a sharp increase in the demand for solar panels in the future. Silicon materials also saw a rise, albeit limited, mainly because silicon is so common. Whether it’s monocrystalline silicon or polycrystalline silicon, the primary cost lies in the extraction and manufacturing, rather than the material’s intrinsic value.
——
After the technology related to the Unlimited Power Automobile was made public, Yixing Unlimited Power Company’s next issue was sales.
But this hardly posed a problem.
One could tell from the public reaction that the first batch of ten thousand cars would sell out on the day they hit the market.
Yixing Unlimited Power Company had just formed its sales department, which barely staffed a dozen people, several of whom were technicians.
The sales department convened a meeting and decided to focus on online orders as the main sales strategy, creating a dedicated sales page and opening orders at a specific time.
Zhao Yi delegated the follow-up work and then took a car to the capital to attend a meeting; he was to participate in a conference concerning space light energy transmission technology.
The higher-ups placed great emphasis on the technology of space light energy transmission.
Yixing Unlimited Power Company had already produced the finished receiver-converter. The Unlimited Power Automobile used a light energy receiver and converter, capable of continuously supplying over forty kilowatts of electrical power.
This was something that warranted serious attention.
A light energy receiver and converter weighing around three hundred kilograms could supply over forty kilowatts of electrical power, and most importantly, it didn’t require any fuel input for the continuous power output.
You should know, space station solar panels achieve, on average, a power conversion rate of just over a hundred kilowatts.
Clearly.
This technology was expected to have a very wide range of future applications, but it would also be subject to certain restrictions, the biggest being the issue with power conversion rates.
The upper echelons directly raised questions about the power rate.
If the power conversion rate issue could be resolved, the related technology could be applied to high-power-demand airplanes or other fields. ƒreewebηoveℓ.com
Zhao Yi shook his head and said, "To apply this technology in the aerospace sector is simply unrealistic, as the Energy-Gathering Satellite’s transmission capabilities are limited. Even if the conversion rate is high enough, it would still be too extravagant to supply high-power-demand airplanes."
"Moreover, it’s difficult for high-speed vehicles requiring fast operations to be powered by electric motors, at least the current technology does not support it."
"However, here I mainly want to speak about the issue of power conversion."
Zhao Yi stood up, indicating the importance of the issue, "In terms of power conversion, there is no technical difficulty, the challenge lies in the manufacturing process."
"Our light energy receiver and converter’s main production cost lies in the silicon wafers."
"Compressed monocrystalline silicon has a melting point over seven thousand degrees Celsius, and both its strength and toughness have greatly improved. Our partnering manufacturers are unable to cut this material into the thin wafers we envision."
"Thus, the converters we’ve constructed do not maximize the conversion efficiency of the internal monocrystalline silicon."
"Our compression materials technology has advanced far beyond manufacturing technology, so I suggest considering the expansion of high-compression materials companies, to scale the production of related structural materials, and to tilt resources toward the civilian manufacturing sector."
"For instance, producing a lathe with higher machining performance using compressed materials—"
Zhao Yi spoke at length, and most of his content was related to manufacturing. What he said were all facts, which garnered affirmations from the other attendees.
The compressed metals produced by the Advanced Compressed Materials Company saw significant improvements in melting point, strength, and toughness.
This type of material, when placed in the manufacturing sector, couldn’t possibly bring its full potential into play because the corresponding manufacturing technologies had not seen similar advancements.
Only higher-end compressed materials could process compressed materials.
Take cutting, for example.
Ordinary cutting lathes attempting to cut high-strength compressed metal materials would likely be damaged immediately, and much of the related processing still required manual operation.
This led to the manufactured products being unable to exhibit their full effectiveness.
The silicone wafers inside the photovoltaic converters were like this; after being produced, their surface was visibly uneven and even bore the marks of manual cutting, posting thicknesses that didn’t meet standards and were more than three times thicker than designed.
With the corresponding manufacturing technologies, the weight of the photovoltaic converters could be reduced from three hundred kilograms to two hundred kilograms, and at the same time, the conversion efficiency could continue to be improved.
The technical meetings organized by upper management focused solely on technology discussions, touching on the confidential nature of compressed material manufacturing, any real decision-making would certainly require several more rounds of meetings.
After the related meetings concluded, Zhao Yi, along with his Yixing team, began discussions with several high-end enterprise departments on the manufacturing of the second Energy-Gathering Satellite.
During the manufacture of the first Energy-Gathering Satellite, discussions about the second one had already taken place, focusing on cost and technology.
Because a large sum had already been paid for technology and patent fees, manufacturing the second energy-gathering satellite would only require an expenditure of two hundred million yuan, to be paid to Space Information Technology and the Aerospace Bureau.
The substantial reduction in patent technology fees reduced the cost of the Energy-Gathering Satellite significantly.
The other core costs were materials and launch. Material costs would depend on the decisions of the upper management—if the Advanced Compressed Materials Company expanded its scale, they could significantly lower costs rather than treating each batch of material produced as if it were an experiment.
Next came launch costs.
The launch cost of the Energy-Gathering Satellite mainly depended on breaking free from Earth’s gravity and required the assistance of the Z-wave devices on the space station.
Every use of the space station’s Z-wave devices required an energy refill.
This process was extremely complex, and the costs were exorbitantly high.
Therefore, Zhao Yi thought of the originally planned ’launch of the high-power Z-wave satellites’.
Since the Energy-Gathering Satellite was already operational, it was time to commence the next step of launching high-power Z-wave satellites to establish space routes.
Now that there were no technical difficulties, there were no issues with manufacturing. The assistance of the Aerospace Bureau was mainly for ground launches, which would make use of large anti-gravity propulsors.
Before negotiating with the Aerospace Bureau, Zhao Yi had already performed detailed calculations.
The high-power Z-wave satellite they planned to produce required an electrical power of over one thousand five hundred kilowatts. A single Z-wave transmission could establish a space shuttle route from about four hundred kilometers above the Earth, extending all the way to Mars or the sun’s surface, with the distances ranging between one hundred and thirty million kilometers to two hundred million kilometers.
Moreover, the time needed to accumulate energy before each use was to be less than half a month.
If the power could reach one thousand eight hundred kilowatts, the energy storage time could be reduced to a week, allowing it to be considered ’capable of frequent use.’
Z-wave technology was mature.
The photovoltaic converter, which converted fifteen million watts of electric power, was roughly equivalent to scaling up the transformer on a car by more than thirty times, with a total weight of around ten tons.
If compressed material technology were applied in manufacturing, enabling the production of more precisely cut silicon wafers and greatly enhancing the energy conversion rate, then the volume of the photovoltaic converters could be shrunk to less than ’fifteen times’ their current size, and a weight of approximately six tons would be sufficient.
Now, with mature high-power Z-wave satellite technology, the time had come to open the space routes.
