Crowd Power: The Latest In Renewable Energy
by Justin Thomas, Virginia on 06.27.06
Vibrations from passing trucks, the rumbling of speeding trains and even the footfall of busy city commuters could be captured and converted into energy to light walkways and buildings, engineers say. A London-based architectural firm is working on a project that aims to harness the pulse of a city and use it as a renewable energy source.
Facility Architects director Clair Price says tens of thousands of people can pass through urban hubs like train stations during rush hour. "You don't need to be a maths genius to realise that if you can harness that energy... you can actually generate a very useful power source that is currently being wasted," she says. Price's team has financial and technical support from several organisations for the proposal. "My first reaction when I saw it was wow, this is fantastic," says Tony Bates, business development manager at Scott Wilson, an engineering consultancy firm based in the UK. "As an engineer of course, you can really see that this can really work."
Bates and Price are now in the process of developing a joint partnership to make the idea a reality. The architectural team is working with university research groups to finish two vibration-harvesting prototypes by December. The first is a staircase that will contain hydraulic or piezoelectric technology in the risers. The technology will pick up kinetic energy from commuter footfalls and convert it into an electrical current.
Climbing stairs requires more force, which means there's more energy to be tapped. Engineering experts from the University of Hull hope to develop a system that will convert at least 50% of the six to eight watts each person typically generates while walking. The current will be stored in a battery, which can be used to provide energy for lighting or electronic devices. The second prototype is a wireless lighting system that will use tiny generators with components designed to resonate at the same frequency as surrounding vibrations. The resonance will either move a magnet relative to a coil or put stress on a crystalline structure inside a generator to produce a current. Light-emitting diodes connected to such vibration harvesters could illuminate the underside of arches.
Via: Hugg and News In Science
This concept is being already worked on for vehicles and human traffic by a Welland, Ontario company - Kinergy Power Corp http://www.kinergypower.com/. It's all about kinetic energy baby yeah!!!!
somehow I don't think this would ever work.. the amount of materials used and the rate of failure due to complexity would far outweigh the benefits
Actually I think this would work great. Initially, maybe not as a primary/stand-alone power source (due to Mike's reasons) but definitely as a secondary/supplementary source. This sounds really interesting and it should be easy enough to test with low-cost trials. Fantastic idea!
So... It will feel like you're climbing stairs covered in molasses...
I'd say it's only going to increase elevator traffic!
Speaking of human energy production, has anyone come across some sort of gym that uses people as a power source? Why not look for energy where people are actually expending it?
That gym idea is superb. I assume that fitness centers are not actually doing it because it would be too costly to somehow connect all their fitness machines to an electrical system. I'm also curious -- are there any gyms out there that do this?
Errr - the laws of physics will kick in here...
A fit person exercising flat out will produce about 1kw max, for only a few seconds. Putting that in perspective:
Kettle at home uses ~1.5kw, Hotwater system ~ 2.5kw
most car engines are around 100kw or greater.
People power is great - but will only ever power an extremley small proportion of the energy we use - in fact having one less cup of coffee a day may save more energy (heating, cooking transporting, farming) than a person produces in a day...
But yes, people walking up stairs may be able to power LED lights, but that is about it. This won't save the world but still nice to see some new ideas...
Not many people realize that the pickups commonly used to amplify acoustic instruments use a polymer with long lasting piezo-electric properties called polyvinylidene flouride. A tiny strip of it vibrated is sufficient to power a small bulb. Piezo electric crystalls are even more efficient and long lasting. The problem is not in collecting a useful amount of electricity in a cost effective manner; rather the obstacle is in determining what to do with it that is cost effective: e.g. harvesting is easy, processing is not! To prove this to yourself, the next time you are standing next to an office tower with metal or glass exterior, located on a busy urban street, put your ear right up next to an exterior wall. The conducted vibrations and resonances from wind stress and general city noise levels are quite obvious to the human ear. Were an entire exoskeleton of one of these buildings covered in a piezoelectically active material the generating capacity would be significant. But how would you feed the electrcity into an internal grid? That is the design challenge.
Footnote: pyroelectric generation is also possible, harvesting the heat flux generated by the sun's rising and setting. Some common and relatively benign materials display both piezoelectric and pyproelectric properties. A commonsense approach might be to marry these materials to solar photovoltaic panels, piggy backing on the system's electricity processing capability.
I think that decentralization ov power is the direction we should be moving and these sort of technologies are going to pave the way. In a world where each object or building or comunity provides as much of its own power as possible blackouts and oil dependance would be a thing of the past.
imagine how much energy could be harnessed if the sidewalks of times square, or as the previous poster said the skin of buildings.
Maybe the team could also investigate the possibilities of ‘ energy harvesting ‘ from the raising of eyebrows – en masse ?
I remeber a little bit from physical science class in 8th grade that "energy is not created or destroyed, but only transferred". This innovation is marinating in that phrase. All the public spaces should be first on the research and development list for this technology.
A friend of mine recently started climbing the stairs in her 10-story office building during lunch for exercise. With this system you'd be taking advantage of lunch-time stair hikes and encouraging more people to take those hikes...a feedback loop that might result in some serious wattage!
Good Idea already been done...
For more info please visit:
www.kinergypower.ca
Contact us dont be shy
Kinergypower looks very promising. I checked their web site and is awsome the idea to harvest the kinetic energy from cars, trains, stairs, speed bumps, people, is fantastic.
The concept of CROWD POWER is just amazing.For teenagers like me who want to do a lot of research with minimum wastage of power, the idea is really thrilling.This was first explained to me by my grandfather who is an engineer and a true genius.While discussing on innovative ways of power saving and generation,he told me about this and I realised how much power we can save and generate everyday, every second whenever we put our feet on ground! This is just enticing!Wow I just love it!