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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?
"
On a Harley block these could power my Microwave!
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.
I know plenty of women that get energy from vibrating objects.
"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.
Test your net with Netalyzr
imagine the ultimate cellphone - one that charges the battery every time it rings/vibrates
You'll still need to recharge the phone (maybe not as much, but I'm pretty sure that you won't find that significant of a different from regular phone), otherwise you are talking perpetual motion machines.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Since the posts thus far are mostly about cell phones regaining power by ringing.. Step 1: Vibrate. Step 2: Violate laws of thermodynamics. Step 3: ? Step 4: Profit!
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Yes! A phone that charges itself when it rings or vibrates.
And next, we can build a machine that, when slowing down from drag, uses that potential energy to cause another part of itself to move faster. Then, it would never stop. We could task it to make electricity to power... everything!
From cars that have more electricity at the end of the trip than when they started, to bicycles that coast faster when going uphill, the possibilities are... perpetual!
fifth sigma, inc.
Any energy captured from a vibration recovery system will unavoidably be less than the energy required to make the mechanism vibrate. Now capture of energy from externally generated vibrations would be useful...recharge your phone by placing it on top of a tower with a noisy fan.
This is a way to power small, low-power devices parasitically from the vibrations of a much larger engine. Actually very interesting.
but even I can figure out that cell phones are _not_ an application for this technology. This is talking about machines that vibrate anyways, and using the vibration as a means of reclaiming some of the energy expended throught the vibration. Cell/pager vibration will always require more energy to vibrate than they can reclaim unless the efficiency of this mechanism is greater than 100% (and unless my understanding of high school physics is wrong that is not possible.)
Can people read and understand articles before posting once in a while? Pretty please?
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
> one that charges the battery every time it rings/vibrates
I sure hope you are just making a joke. If you're not being deliberately stupid, I impressed by your natural talent.
Anything that obtains energy from vibrations or sound is going to dampen those vibrations or muffle the sound [same thing really]. If phones can save energy like this, maybe you can levitate by pulling your own hair up. In fact, I recommend you try this.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
If vibration is used to gain energy from it, the vibration will be damped accordingly following the law of conservation of energy.
A phone charging when it vibrates is therefore pointless.
Nevertheless this invention could have a host of useful appliances.
Where do you think the energy to make the phone vibrate comes from?
Getting energy from the vibrations from the environment around a device is a great idea, but the submitter is on crack about getting more cell phone battery life.
Any extra juice you got would reduce the amount of virbation aparent to the user, so you'd have to spend at least that amount of energy extra to still have a working virate feature. You could have even longer talk time by not vibrating at all.
No only if they could harness the wasted energy that sites writers use by making all the "high-tech" terms in their articles clickable to websearchs of the said terms to try and make it seem "cutting edge" internet reporting.
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
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.
I'm pretty sure that a call to vibrate() every few minutes will do nothing but drain the battery quicker. Obviously, the conversion from vibration back to stored electricity can't be 100% efficient, so vibrating the phone will always cause a net loss.
As somebody else mentioned, would this be able to harness motion of the phone? Most people lug their cell phones around in a pocket/bag/purse, and they go through a lot of motion in your average day. Given that this technology is purpose-built to extract energy from engine vibrations (thousands of RPMs) it seems unlikely that it could efficiently harness day-to-day jarring of a cell phone. Perhaps a mechanism like that found in self-winding watches (a simple unbalanced wheel and some gearing) might be better suited to the task... anybody know if this would be practical, or if it has been done before?
Do I see 3G applications with a vibrate() call mandatory every couple minutes?
;-)
And I thought there was just *one* of them G thingys that needed vibration.
And now its gonna be mandatory?! Every 2 mins?
ahem
This is one slashdot story I'll need to read at -1, just for the vibrator trolls
The actual invention is interesting, but only marginally useful. The idea is to power various low-power sensors using airflow or duct vibration in HVAC systems. This makes possible wireless sensors in some specialized applications. There might be applications in medical devices. But it's not a general purpose energy source.
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 was about to post this about 'self winding watches' but that would hardly be called 'vibrations'. Anyway, recovering energy, however miniscule, that would otherwise be waste heat is always good.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I dunno about this -- my girlfriend seems to have no energy whatsoever left after I apply vibrations to her for 10-15 minutes straight...
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'
Please. Everyone should make basic errors in logical reasoning in their submissions, that way, we'll never talk about anything else. Slashdot will be ruined. My evil plans will come to fruition! Ah ha ha ha ha HA HA HA!
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
12 inch vibrator! Save the environment while you pleasure yourself!
"In mathematics, it's not enough to read the words -- you have to hear the music"
Those squiggly pens could be perpetual motion generators! :-)
Pam and Tommy Lee could have powered the United States while they were together..
The San Andreas Power Plant..
The London Philharmonic Orchestral Power Plant..
Unrepaired PowerMac G4's could power themselves
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
I thought the Second Law said something about Robots being forced to obey humans except if it would harm humans :)
Hate to reply to myself, but....
What about hooking your sister/daughter/wife up with a phone that generates electricity when she's talking. That could really answer the worlds energy needs...
At least pay for the phone calls themselves...
"Hon, time to call your mother again, the lights are getting dim."
Kinetic powered watches already exist. They have a pendulum that winds by you moving. Probably wouldn't work too well with keyboard/desk bound programmers.
0xfeedface
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!
So the Navy initially funded this research? Hmmm... So the tiny vibrations normally transmitted through the hull of the submarine as noise now gets converted into electrical energy with a by-product of dampening the vibrations? Very interesting. Not that they need the energy on a nuclear sub, but they definitely don't need the vibrations causing noise.
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.
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
It's not a matter of not being able to reduce the vibration. It is the vibration of the V-twins that make people want to buy them.
Take away the vibration an no one will want to buy them.
Subject title sums up my knowledge in these fields, so I will do everyone a favor and shut-up at this point.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
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...
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.
Recently? Some Swiss railways have had regenerative braking for many years. Even had 3-phase overhead and track supply so that the energy could be fed straight back. Unfortunately you can't regenerative brake a pure combustion engine, unless you have a clever way of converting CO2 + water -> gas plus oxygen.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
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.
Can't believe that in Slashdot, and in the 21st century, some people still think you can get "free energy"... sigh...
:o)
Hey, you can!
Just run an extension cord over to your neighbor's house when he's sleeping
They cant do THAT!
I have a patent on perpetual motion engines!!!!!!
I'm gonna sue
lick the cancle button (at least thats what our Chinese QA says)
How marvellously novel. I'm sure no-one has ever found a way to absorb energy from movement and store it for later use before, or turn that stored energy into electricity.
And on the subject of using the phone's own vibrating alert to recharge the battery: "Lisa! In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!".
You win again, gravity!
Damn thermodynamics... always holding us back.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
Dildo's don't vibrate
Since it is sensitive enough to generate power from the normal activity of ventilation systems, the advent of wearable computing devices will have a source of power that is relavent to when the devices are being used. This could be a real boon for animal biologists, since current tracking collars have fairly limited lifespans. But it's going to be a revolution for areas where power is hard to provide power, and you have irregular activity you want to measure/record.
Anywhere that is seismically active, either naturally, or in close proximity to rail lines, highways, etc. will be able to power gear to help make sense of activity in these regions: better earthquake predictions from sensors that communicate when activity occurs, but that are essentially 'distribute and forget'; orders of magnitude better targeting of activity because you can readily cover large amounts of geography via airdrop instead of sending crews into the field to install powered sites. Traffic sensors/guidance equipment that is embeddded into to the road surface.
If the hardware to capture power can readily be built into infrastructure, this could be highly benficial, for example, in oil drilling; you'd get data from the entire length of the bore. Or the space shuttle could harness many more sensors to measure strucural integrity because they wouldn't need to be wired. Or even smart tools that know when their working parts are experiencing significant stresses.
Very cool.
eskwayrd = m^2c^4
First of all you cannot continually recharge a cellphone by using its battery to vibrate and use the vibration to recharge it. You can recapture some of the energy, but you will lose more than is gained. So you wouldn't want to vibrate it uneccisarily.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Imagine an energy scavenger like this inside a standard PC keyboard. You could power Intels hungriest processors using Windows and Ctrl-Alt-Del...
In this house, we OBEY the laws of thermodynamics!
Random is the New Order.
"I don't know why we didn't see it before", stated a young lab assistant at the M.I.T center for alternative energy. "I wonder if Thomas Edison truely realized the potential in his invention."
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Of course, one can't get any more energy. Duh.
/s = 21.3 W.
But exactly how much energy could one get out of a vibration? Are we talking powering an LED by the San Andreas fault? Or are we talking powering San Francisco from the vibrations on an air conditioning shaft?
Let's see:
We'll consider the vibrations to be simple harmonic motion (because it is relatively accurate, and anything else is near impossible to calculate without a beowolf cluster).
Let's look at the vibration when your car goes over a speed bump. This should have a relatively large energy associated with it, since the energy in a object due to vibration is:
E = 0.5 K A^2
Where k is the spring constant (in metric, it would be N / m ).
K can be determined by calculating how far your car is lowered when you get in (your weight, in newtons, divided by how far your car is lowered, in meters).
Let's assume that you weigh 150 lbs. This is about 70 kilos, or 670 Newtons. Let's also assume that your car is lowered by about an inch when you get in (0.0254 m).
This makes the spring constant for your car's suspension:
670 N / 0.0254 m = 26,378 N / m
This is to say that if one were to depress your car's suspension by one meter, you would be exerting a force of 26,378 Newtons.
Let's also assume that, when going over the speed bump, your car bounces 10 inches. Thus, the amplitude of your car's motion is 5 inches, or 0.127 meters. Putting this information, and the spring constant into the first equation for energy:
E = 0.5 ( 26,378 N ) ( 0.0127 M ) ^ 2
E = 213 Joules.
Great. How does this relate to power needed for powering some electronic device?
Power = Energy / Time.
Let's assume that this vibrations to energy device in the article can absorb your car's vibrational energy in 10 seconds. Thus, the power going into the device is:
213 J / 10 s = 21.3 J
That's right. 21 watts. Barely enough to power a small lightbulb. And that is coming from a whole car!
Thus, I think that we can safely say that we're not going to be replacing our power plants any time soon. But for, say, a low-powered electronic sensor, which wirelessly broadcasts it's data in bursts every ten seconds, it would be fine.
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.
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.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
It would be so sweet to have a system of ultrabright LEDs powered by, or at least recharged by, a vibration-absorbing power supply. All the benefits of a bike magneto, none of the drag.
Do I see 3G applications with a vibrate() call mandatory every couple minutes?
You do not. MC Hawking wrote an excellent article on why this wouldn't work:
Entropy, how can I explain it? I'll take it frame by frame it,
to have you all jumping, shouting saying it.
Let's just say that it's a measure of disorder,
in a system that is closed, like with a border.
It's sorta, like a, well a measurement of randomness,
proposed in 1850 by a German, but wait I digress.
"What the fuck is entropy?", I here the people still exclaiming,
it seems I gotta start the explaining.
You ever drop an egg and on the floor you see it break?
You go and get a mop so you can clean up your mistake.
But did you ever stop to ponder why we know it's true,
if you drop a broken egg you will not get an egg that's new.
That's entropy or E-N-T-R-O to the P to the Y,
the reason why the sun will one day all burn out and die.
Order from disorder is a scientific rarity,
allow me to explain it with a little bit more clarity.
Did I say rarity? I meant impossibility,
at least in a closed system there will always be more entropy.
That's entropy and I hope that you're all down with it,
if you are here's your membership.
Chorus
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me! (x3)
Who's down with entropy?
Every last homey!
Defining entropy as disorder's not complete,
'cause disorder as a definition doesn't cover heat.
So my first definition I would now like to withdraw,
and offer one that fits thermodynamics second law.
First we need to understand that entropy is energy,
energy that can't be used to state it more specifically.
In a closed system entropy always goes up,
that's the second law, now you know what's up.
You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game,
'cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame.
The second law, as we now know, is quite clear to state,
that entropy must increase and not dissipate.
Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
That, in a nutshell, is what entropy's about,
you're now down with a discount.
Since it took energy from your battery to vibrate the phone in the first place, you will lose more than you gain if you try to use that energy to recharge them.
This is basic law of thermodynamics. Did the collective intelligence of slash-dot just drop recently while I was asleep?
Always, as long as there is a remote possibility of it applying to the subject. Sometimes even that isn't a necessity.
Seriously, if the Sun and the earth were the only two objects (no third body problems, PLEASE!!!) and they were point masses then it should from a newtonian perspective always revolve with the same speed for all time.
If there were no third bodies (as you said), and the sun and earth were in a closed, complete vaccuum with no other matter (which they're not), and the radiant energy from the sun didn't have any effect on the earth's movement (which it does - albeit very, very slight) then yeah, they should always rotate the same speed for all time..
But to paraphrase Suzie Derkins, "as long as you're wishing, you should ask for a pony."
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.
A planet where apes evolved from men? Long live the apes.