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Energy From Vibrations
JN writes "Now here's a nifty invention. What started off as a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the Navy to a MIT professor has turned out to become a great mechanism that harnesses running machines' minute vibrations into energy. The possibilities are limitless. Aside from the obvious, imagine the ultimate cellphone - one that charges the battery every time it rings/vibrates, hence promising extended talktimes, and giving operators all the more reasons to get their customers to use their devices. How cool is that? Do I see 3G applications with a vibrate() call mandatory every couple minutes?
"
"Young lady, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics"
The article is (I assume) about energy recovery/scavenging, but the article poster just invented perpetual motion, arguing that the vibrator from the ringer could power the cellphone.
HA.
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If you harnessed (sp?) the energy from the vibrating cell phone, wouldent it cease to vibrate, and thus be quite lame? The original article is ok, but this poster hasn't really thought this stuff through. Nick Harbour
Nearly half of all people are below average
what about the simple vibrations a phone endures just sitting on someone's belt? would simply walking around create enough vibration on the phone?
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I'm just trying to point out that the statement in the original post about a cell phone charging itself through the ringer/vibrator is absurd. Any such device would have to effectively dampen vibrations, so you'd just be reducing the output of the vibrator and wasting energy in conversion.
The vibration of a cell phone is not wasted. It is intentional. To pick up energy from the vibration would be to damp it, then you'd have to vibrate more to get the same alerting effect.
Even if you could get power from the vibration, it would mean that the vibration (which is intentionally selected) is unwanted, or that you would have to crank up the power going into the vibration to compensate.
This supposed energy collector is meant to pick up wasted, unwanted vibrations from engines, ventilation ducts, etc. Not from intentional vibrations.
Infuriate left and right
I know you're joking, but mechanical vibrations that you can't do anything to prevent are probably the best application of this technology.
Remember conservation of energy and thermodynamics... you're not going to get 'free' energy by strapping this to a buzzing, vibrating machine. You might regain a tiny fraction of the energy which the machine is losing (wasting) through its inefficiency, but in that case, you'd probably be better off replacing or repairing the machine to be more efficient.
The applications for this technology are narrow, like powering (small) things in inaccessible areas, like ventilation systems. You're not going to power your factory lights from the vibrations from your machining centers, but you could probably pay your light bill (in the long term) from the savings from replacing or upgrading old, worn out, inefficient machines.
You are missing the point. If you are going to vibrate the phone, you use stored energy. If you want to "Capture" some of that vibration and turn it back into energy, then you DAPEND that energy, thus meaning that 1> Some of the Energy you used to vibrate the phone is lost and 2> some of the vibration is lost, and 3> some of the energy is lost again trying to store the vibration.
So, if you want to make you vibrating phone last longer, spend less energy making vibrations. The gains from this are far greater than any attempt (no matter how you do it) to recapture the energy.
As another poster said, one useful application would be making the phone capable of charging itself if placed on an external source of energy (such as some loud or vibrating surface).
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
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That gets me thinking - I remember reading about some sort of mouse-pad looking thing that was supposed to recharge all of your partable devices when you placed them on it, eliminating the need for all those different chargers.
Seems you could use the same theory, have the pad vibrate ever so slightly, and capture that energy (much in the way the kinetic wrist-watches mentioned elsewhere do) to charge the devices.
Then again, maybe it would just vibrate everything onto the floor.
Ack!
I've often pulled up in traffic next to a large bore diesel or a group of Harleys and thought, gosh, that engine is shaking the hell out of my car. They should have figured out a way to more efficiently harness that loss of energy, or designed the engine with parts that better transfer kenetic energy when, say the piston changes directions. The same when cruising on a large boat and the very large bore engines vibrate the entire boat...
While there are many potential applications for scavenging vibration, the specific example cited in the post is poor. If you scavenge the energy expended to make a phone vibrate it will, of course, no longer vibrate. Sort of self defeating.
The trick is to identify sources of vibration that inherently useful. Could you, for instance, harness vibration from an internal combustion engine? If so, you would improve the entire system dramatically by eliminating the need for an alternator and reducing unwanted vibration with something more productive than pneumatics, hydraulics, rubber bumpers and foam.
Vibration is a profoundly complex matter. People devote entire careers to understanding and mitigating vibration. I have an engine in my car that has two "balance shafts". One of these shafts spins at 2x the speed of the crankshaft. I believe this is because a 90 deg V6 is an inherently unbalanced design. Yet engineers go to extraordinary lengths to mitigate this because the net benefits of the complete package outweigh the cost of creating a lot of additional rotating mass.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Now we can tap in a car engine's vibrations to recharge the battery...
Make it more efficient, and it can dampen the vibrations enough to even replace the muffler!
Obviously the idea of the cellphone charging itself by using its battery power to vibrate to recharge the battery is bunk, but that aside, there are plenty of other vibration sources. Your cellphone could just clip onto your dashboard and charge with every little bump you drive over (of course, newer suspensions would make that a little harder to do ;). There are a lot of other vibration sources out there as well.
Vibration can also easily be produced from renewable resources, or as a byproduct of other processes. Imagine on the street above a subway, having a "charging table" which vibrated every few minutes as the train passed under it. Or a wind-powered system to do the same thing.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
haven't you ever heard of conservation of energy or entropy? Everytime the phone rings, some energy would be used and some of the might be regained, but not all of it, so rining the phone occaisonally would just be a waste because you wouldn't get all of the energy from each ring back.
Now go sit in the corner and think about what you are about to say before it comes out of your mouth.
Taking over one bit at a time...
Imagine. Your systems are running fine, and suddenly half of your sensors stop working. Two days later you find out it's because the HVAC man came around and upgraded all the old compressors' parts to run with no vibration ('cuz it increases the life of those machines, you see), and now all your little micropowered machines have stopped working.
It would seem to me depending on a machine to be inefficient (and thus stealing some of its wasted energy) has this equivalent in the software world: depending on a bug or deficiency in the OS to make your application work. Someone's gonna finally think to fix that bug or deficiency.
fifth sigma, inc.
perpetual motion is possible! ... Proof? Earth's revolution around the sun, the moon's revolution around the earth etc.
Suggesting that the movement of celestial bodies is "perpetual motion" is ludicrous.
"Perpetual motion" (in the context used here) means that you can extract more energy from a device than you put in - which is clearly impossible.
Even taken literally (ie. that something will continue to move forever), it's still not possible - your examples just show that you don't have a very firm grasp of physics, or knowledge of astronomy or geology.
The earth will not continue revolving around the sun indefinitely. It's gradually slowing down, and will probably be consumed by the sun before it comes to a complete halt.
I suspect that the "vibration" of the phone/base was a side effect ot the recharging process, rather than the actual manner of recharging. "Inductive" chargers (and connections) already exist and are widely used - my Braun electric toothbrush has one; many electric vehicles have them (don't want exposed 220V contacts that might hurt people). These work on the same principles as transformers that get power from one wire to another even though there is no direct flow of electrons.
To paraphrase the parent post's comments:
A cell phone will use more energy to create the vibration than it will be able to regain from that vibration.
Due to the laws of thermodynamics and energy,(particularly the law that energy can neither be created nor destroyed), the device that generates energy from vibration would then (by definition) have to absorb some of the vibration's energy. Therefore, in order for this mechanism to "produce" any amount of valuable energy, the source (the cell phone) would have to increase its vibration. However, it will always be the case that the cell phone uses more energy than it gains back (otherwise the phone wouldn't vibrate). Therefore, it would be more condusive of the cell phone to focus its energy on notifying its owner of an incoming call, and do so in the most efficient way.
Basically, (as stated in the parent post) this invention at MIT doesn't do much for the cell phone industry. Cell phones would be better off being more efficient with the energy they have rather than trying to regain some of the energy expelled while producing environmental feedback.
What about small windmills in the ducts?
Wouldn't generate much power, but it might be enough to keep a battery-powered sensor charged.
It'd create some drag in the duct, but a lot of ducts are large enough that it might not matter.
It's too bad that you couldn't electrically charge the duct and get power from the differential between the duct and ground.
If the vibrate call, made the cell phone vibrate, the energy the cell phone would use in order to make itself vibrate would be quite a bit more than the energy it would recieve back.
If anybody has found a way to gain more energy
back from an action than what you put in, Id love to hear about it.
(Outside of thermonuclear reactions and the harvesting of potential energy)
Right, and that's a good point, but the purpose of the regenerative braking system is to recover some of the losses associated with braking, not to recharge the car's fuel supply so that it can continue to go. The submitter makes the mistake of thinking that the cell phone could vibrate and allow it to keep going for another hour. That's akin to getting low on fuel, applying the brakes, storing the scrubbed kinetic energy, and then using it to start accelerating again. Even with 100% efficiency, you're no better than where you were before.
Plus, if you're collecting energy from the phone's vibration, you're going to make it vibrate less. The value of the system is to collect energy from unwanted or wasted movement. The vibration of a cell phone is a desired use of energy.
i would think it would be obvious to this crowd, but it was mentioned twice in the summary alone.
the energy required to make the cell phone vibrate would be more than it could recoup from charging from vibrations. there is no perpetual cellphone.
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They use about 1/4th as much power (they're still pretty inefficient as far as flourescent bulbs go) and last much longer.
And best of all, they're available NOW! (go get a 4 pack at Home Depot for $7.99.)
Always, as long as there is a remote possibility of it applying to the subject. Sometimes even that isn't a necessity.
It's sad to see articles from people that don't understand conservation of energy. The only thing that would happen with a "mandatory vibration" is a loss of total energy. You can't get free energy from the system. Either the poster got trolled or is just talking out of his ass.
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