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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?
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Reminds me of this article. But seriously, wouldn't the daily movement of the cell phone user also be useful? Granted, it's not as vigorous as the vibrate feature, but it has to account for something.
"Crud, I dropped my cell phone. But now I have ten more minutes of talk time! Gotta love solid state!"
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
This is a way to power small, low-power devices parasitically from the vibrations of a much larger engine. Actually very interesting.
I had an idea kind of like this a while back, when I had to replace the little watch battery in the key fob for my car (the little remote-control that unlocks my doors). So instead of having to replace this battery, I thought it would be a good idea to make it a small rechargable battery. It would utilize the kinetic vibrations of the car, which would be transfered into electricity. Or to be more precise, inside the keyfob would be a tiny magnet on the end of a tiny spring. The vibrations would cause the spring to wave the magnet around, and the moving electromagnetic field would be transferred into electricity.
This would be especially efficient for the keyfobs that are part of the key structure themselves, so that they are directly connected to the steering column (as opposed to the ones that are simple part of the keychain and just dangle under the steering column)
And it's not like I'm claiming originality on this -- I got the idea from a tiny cell phone a friend brought back from Japan. It had no connectors on it to recharge the battery, but the recharger base would vibrate when the phone was set on it, and passed the electicity via electromagnetic fields.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
The article is (I assume) about energy recovery/scavenging
Classic slashdot. You know, you could actually read the article and find out. You do go to berkeley.
the article poster just invented perpetual motion, arguing that the vibrator from the ringer could power the cellphone.
Well, he didn't imply "power," he stated "recover." As others have mentioned, any vibration recovered isn't giving you that tingly feeling that says your phone is going off. So nothing doing there, but Hemos isn't quite as daft as you think. (Insert ./ editor joke here)
What this article is really about (I feel like I'm making Cliff's Notes here for the science-deprived) is not recovering a significant proportion of power from a low-power device like a cell phone. It's about powering a milliwatt-draining device like a sensor off of, say, a megawatt-producing device like a nuclear reactor. This is actually kind of cool, since as the article states (for the literate among you), there are places with no light, no wiring, and a lot of vibrations where you might need power. So this has the chance to do some cool things - just don't expect it to actually extend the life of your cell phone or be a perpetual-motion machine.
On the interesting side, this would make a cool way to create non-powered earthquake sensors. When it gets a quake, it transmits its position and maybe have the power out proportional to power in. You could distribute hundreds of them and have a real-time quake sensor that might be better than triangulating.
Also, could be useful to track vehicles if you slap it on the chassis. Again, deploy once, no worries about going dead.
I'm in the HVAC controls industry. Many sensors are required in ventilation systems (primarily air handlers) to control them properly. This is costly, not because of the cost of the sensor, but because of the wiring and conduit required to reach the sensor. We have little choice about the location of the sensor (it has to be able to do its job).
There has been talk of trying to build wireless sensors (some do exist) and actuators, but the killer is the power. It either needs to be brought in on wires or battery powered. Batteries are not very good because they don't last that long (these systems are designed to run for over 10 years) and some sensors are difficult to access.
So, this could be looked at as an enabling technology, in that it could allow wireless sensors to become practical (by running off the ductwork vibration).
In a mid-sized office building, the installation savings from this would be around $100k. Look around at how many buildings there are...
GRH