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Piezoelectric Generators
Teahouse writes: "The U.S. Navy has developed this polymer "eel" that they dump in the water and get a trickle charge back. The biggest application for this would be for deep sea bouys that track weather across the pacific. This could extend accuracy, and lifespans...and save a few lives along the way. Here is the story." NOAA uses buoys that are solar powered and are left out for a year or more at a time, but I imagine that if this worked they'd be interested, too.
If these thins can work at extreme depths, then maybe they could be used for undersea cables. In an ideal situation, perhaps the cable itself could be coated with or paralleled with a series of these to generat significant amounts of current.
Another application might be for space tethers is the could be hung like flags off the length of the tether to provide power for warning lights.
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I have been doing a reserch paper on this stuff, some great resources also found at:
? I=331&ParentID=146
7 /p37.html
http://www.piezo.com/kgs.html
http://www.avxcorp.com/prodinfo_productdetail.asp
http://www.ndt.net/article/yosi/yosi.htm
http://www.tokin.com/Tokin_America_Products/37/p3
http://www.biospec.com/HomePage/Review.html
http://www.morganelectroceramics.com/pzmat1.html
Have fun...
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
I want to read the article too, but I get a "Connection refused" message. Do you need a login/password to see it like NY Times articles??
I suspect that the Navy really developed this as a way to expand the SOSUS (SOund SUrveillance System) sonar network, which presently uses long undersea cables to connect the sensors to the monitoring point. Being able to drop buoys wherever and immediately start collecting data would be a great boon. There have been earlier unattached buoys used by the Navy, but they were typically deployed against a specific threat and died quickly. A perpetually self-powered one that didn't have to poke a large solar array above the water and betray its presense would be far better. It would certainly be much less vulnerable to having the enemy (and the occasional accident) cut the sensor cables.
A football scarf is a long (5-9ft) knitted scarf displaying the names of footballers (soccer-club players). They look like this. They're popular among football (soccer) fans in cold European climates: they let you root for the home club without having to take off your warm coat.
Read the rest of this comment...
...if you stick something in the ocean, one of
three things will happen:
1 - something will grow on it
2 - something will try to eat it
3 - it will corrode
There are *no* exceptions to this rule.
Really, I can already see Bob Izumi describing how to rig a 'football scarf shapped polymer eel' bait Texas style; for when you wanna go after great-whites and tigers. The beauty of it is it will also power your trolling motor.
"we need a bigger buoy"
I don't know about other predators, but sharks will stay far far away from these I would think. Sharks have electroreceptors. That's why they can find food even in the dark or in water filled with blood.
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Todd's Law: All things being equal, you lose!
If you want these to be practical on a spy craft, you need to use a "free" source of propulsive power. That way, the efficiency losses don't matter. Of course, your craft goes slower, but you don't waste your power source.
There are some "free" sources of propulsive power in the ocean. For instance, somebody worked on a craft that used the thermal expansion of contration of a glycol solution to cause the craft to rise and fall through thermal gradients. Put wings on such a craft and you can use this vertical motion to create horizontil motion. The thermal gradients provide the energy.
Karl
I'm a slacker? You're the one who waited until now to just sit arround.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
Bruce Sterling recently included this in his Viridian mailing list http://www.bespoke.org/viridian/. Viridian is a great read, although I the archives seem to be lagging a bit behind the mailing list at the moment.
You could start by reading the viridian manifesto outlined with gobs of beautiful green.
The drag caused by these is greater than the energy they put out (see the 2nd law of thermodynamics).
All the second law says is that the entropy of a closed system doing irreversible work is increasing. A raft with one of these things hanging in the ocean is NOT a closed system.
Back when I was a grad student (early 70's) one of the students in my department developed a device that we called a collagen engine that worked on the same princlple. Collagen is a natural polymer that contracts is salt water, and expands in fresh water (simply taking advantage in the difference of chemical potential between water in both systems) much like the synthetic polymer described here. With this contraction, and winding the collagen fiber around a couple of tapered spindles it is possible to turn the contraction into mechanical work (which could be used to drive just about anything).
In the middle of the ocean the power source is obviously fresh water, which will gradually become contaminated by salt. When the concentration of salt in the fresh water equals that of ocean water there is no potential energy left that can be converted to kinetic energy, and the machine stops.
This seems like a neat way to generate electricity from the human body. An outfit made with panels of this stuff might produce enough current to do something useful? Neon blinking tattoos? Wearable computers with never ending or very augmented power supplies?
-"You'll have plenty of time to sleep when you're dead."
Imagine making a huge kelp bed of this stuff and placing it under the golden gate bridge. Harness the incredible tidal power under the bridge, while not threating wildlife (with spinning turbine blades) and because humans are taking so much fresh water out of the delta, the area of the bay consumed by saltwater has been advancing up the bay. If this flow were slowed down by use of a tidal generator, the salt water parts of the bay would receed back to their original areas.
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TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
This would be great for the neighborhood pool party. Just drop a few of these suckers in during a game of water polo. Bzzzap.
Daniel
I wonder what sharks and other predators will think of this thing waving around in the water. It looks like a big artificial worm or something. Will these things have any predator repellant of any sort?
The prototype eel is essentially an underwater flag the size of a football scarf.
What the fuck is a footbal scarf...did they let dennis miller write the article again?!?
tdawg
You can kill the revolutionary but you can't kill the revolution
....using the gas grill ignitor to shock your friends in the ass. >:]
Thanks Pierre and Jacques.
I'm not trying to troll here, but I swear the first thing that popped to mind when I read the story heading was "Damn, a flexible, charge-emitting polymer?! They're going to have a field-day making electric dildii with that."
Oh, you think I'm joking? Well, there used to be a company called Folsum Electric. Damned if I can find their page anymore. Anyway, there is a listing of their products with pictures here. Personally, I think it's eerie how much that stuff looks like my stereo equipment, well, if my stereo had a 5&3/4" chrome buttplug attached to it anyway... (I wouldn't advise clicking on that if you're easily offended by the sight of objects meant to induce current through various orfices, btw.)
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX
to me this seems like the perfect power source for some form of small submarine style spy tool. add a radar/sonar device, possibly a camera of sorts, a microphone maybe? these things are probably small enough to not get picked up by radar, and could be sent long distances without running out of power.
im sure you guys can think of a few uses for devices like this for use in large bodies of water as well as inside pipes and other common places you wouldnt expect survailence devices...
nifty, yet scary.....
.brad
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