Using Air to Recharge Your Cell Phone

sanspeak writes "Now you do not have to look for a power outlet to charge your cell phones. Department of Industrial Design at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi have come up with a mobile turbine which generates around 3 to 4 watts of energy - sufficient to charge a mobile phone. It costs around $4, fits in your pocket and runs on air ;-). What else do you want ?"

Comments

Blow or run really fast

[nizo]

I can't wait to see people blowing into their phones before they make a call, unless they do what the article recommends:
The device will help mobile phone users charge their phones while travelling in a bus, a car or a train. All they need to do is -- place the turbine against the wind flow.
In other words, hold it out the window. Can they get sued when people drop their phones, or lose an arm while holding it out the window?

compressed air

[psyklopz]

I once thought that it might be an interesting idea to store compressed air in a tank and then let it out at a controlled rate to run a turbine.

In essence, the compressed air tank would be a battery (it would 'hold' the energy that was used to pump the compressed air in).

I don't know a lot of about high pressure tanks. Does anyone know if this would work at all? Would all the air come out too quick to make it worthwhile?

air vs wind

[Hanzie]

I think it might be a little more correct to substitute "wind power" for "air" in the writeup.

Essentially, the idea is to incorporate a windmill to power the phone.

Saying the phone is "Air" powered implys (to me, at least) that some chemical reaction is taking place using oxygen or nitrogen.

It is a cool idea, and the article implies that normal winds are sufficient to power the cell phone.

If the generator is small enough to actually be part of a cell phone, I'd think that scaling the design up might make economic sense for generating normal electric power. Unfortunately, there weren't any specifics, so it is tough to make any extrapolations.

Crank Alternative

[4of12]

Compressed air is an interesting idea for storing energy.

But I have to wonder how it compares to the alternatives.

How about a capacitor bank and a hand-crank generator?

If you're out of compressed gas or batteries in the middle of nowhere it's hard to replenish your cell phone. Turning a hand crank would make use of cheap, available human power.