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Gravity Lamp Grabs Green Prize
eldavojohn writes "A lamp powered by gravity has won the second prize at the Greener Gadgets Conference in NYC. From the article, "The light output will be 600-800 lumens — roughly equal to a 40-watt incandescent bulb over a period of four hours. To "turn on" the lamp, the user moves weights from the bottom to the top of the lamp. An hour glass-like mechanism is turned over and the weights are placed in the mass sled near the top of the lamp. The sled begins its gentle glide back down and, within a few seconds, the LEDs come on and light the lamp ... Moulton estimates that Gravia's mechanisms will last more than 200 years, if used eight hours a day, 365 days a year." The article contains links to the patents and the designer/inventor Clay Moulton's site." I think my laptop would require a slightly larger weight to pull this off.
Where can you buy it and how much.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
you will have to start flipping your desktop over every few minutes ;-)
how long before the home gym captures energy for your home. (pre-patented by the professor on gilligan's). Also, where the hell do I buy one?
meh
How about a clock?
How is this any different than a clock powered by weights? It's nice, but hardly a new idea.
Do you have ESP?
i'm going to use the light from this lamp to power my photovoltaic weight lifting machine.
Will it still be cool to light up your lamp with gravity, when there's no gravity left and people are spinning right off the planet into outerspace? I guess it will eliminate the greenhouse gas issue by allowing the atmosphere to disappear when there's no more gravity left - but unfortunately it will also not allow people to live (the ones that are still on the planet after the other ones spun off into space as noted earlier)
But what will we do after peak gravity?
seems to me the potential energy comes from your muscles;-)
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I had hoped that "using gravity" would be sort of a cheat to get around making a perpetual motion device, but in reality it's powered by a human moving the weight. Instead, its just another clever way to capture gravity that still needs substantial human assistance, similar to a pendulum.
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To say that it runs on potential energy? The device always *has* gravity, but it's not drawing it off. Once you supply the device with some potential energy though, it takes that energy and utilizes it.
I guess "Potentia" isn't as marketable a name, though.
While on the surface it seems greener, it's really quite hard to tell. The light is powered by a falling mass, but the energy to lift the mass in the first place is provided by us. We get that energy from food.
So the real question: Is the end-to-end food energy process greener than the end-to-end electrical energy process?
perhaps I missed it in the article, but does it say how long it lasts before you have to lift the weights again?
space shuttle any time soon, I guess.....
I've already started looking into buying "gravity offsets" and trying to use as much rope, glue, velcro, and static cling as possible.
I like basketball!!1!
Four hours is an awesome run-time for such a device.
I lived in a house once where the land lord had a wind-up radio. It was great in every respect other than its run time; every fifteen minutes or so you had to crank it up again, which made it annoying to use.
-Fl
...think it means. The human body has only about a 20% thermal efficiency. Add to this the ecological cost of transporting goods to the human for consumption, and you'll see where I'm going with this argument: what's touted as a "green" device actually costs the planet more per hour than any other light fixture ever invented.
So this idea may be useful in 3rd world countries where power grids are not available, but anyone with access to hydroelectric, wind, solar, coal, or nuclear power will actually be doing less damage to the planet by plugging the same light bulb into a wall receptacle.
End rant.
Vibrating sex toys that power themselves ?
If that's not true, we could always build an electric motor to move the weight to the top. It could draw solar power...emitted by the lamp, of course.
t
Oh, I thought of that, as well as a contraption that exceeds the speed of light. I'm currently patenting the latter.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Now someone will just have to invent a device which plugs in to an electrical outlet, which *lifts* the weight. That will eliminate the need for someone to do this manually. I'm checking the patent office now for prior inventions. Brilliant.
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
Is this some Darwinist scheme to try and tempt people away from Intelligent Falling?
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
"The light output will be 600-800 lumens - roughly equal to a 40-watt incandescent bulb over a period of four hours."
A standard 40 Watt fluorescent light bulb emits about 900 lumens. This means that this new thing is about 2/3 as bright as regular, 40W bulb. Have you seen how dim 40W is? Now, make it 2/3 as bright... Wake me up when this invention glows as bright as the sun, because I would not spend a dollar on it. Maybe mole people might be interested.
As far as form-factor goes, this device is challenged by its risk of topheaviness. It requires a significant base to keep it from falling over. The weight could be replaced by a bunjie-cord and then it wouldn't have a tendency to fall over.
But the problem with a bunjie cord is that it's a consumable. It also requires significant energy to produce its elasticity. Which also brings up somewhat of a fallacy of this 'green' gravity lamp. The weights and other mechanisms of this lamp require significant energy to produce. The break-even on energy savings is probably realized only after many years of its use.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
You cannot extract power from gravity, but you CAN harvest the potential energy of two masses that are being attracted to each other BY gravity.
This is not a gravity-powered lamp, it's an "environmentally-conscious person moving weights"-powered lamp.
Calling it "gravity-powered" gives the less insightful the impression that it's free energy.
Set up their whole house this way. Put a big stack of 50 lb boxes in the basement, and tell them every evening when they come home from work to haul 30 of those boxes up to the attic and set them on the platform, all of which will be in the basement by this time tomorrow. Bet they change their mind about "free energy" right quick.
Though if you REALLY think about it, people complain about not getting enough exercise, AND complain about their electric bill, and this looks like a nice way to take care of two problems at once. It'd be interesting to try to compare the two monetarily - compare the average salary of someone that works at rent-a-center or U-haul, figure out how much he'd make moving that mass during the day, and compare that with how much of the electrical bill such a mass in a similar gadget could produce. Unfortunately, electricity is relatively cheap compared to labor, and I'd bet lighting up the dinosaurs is a lot more economical in the short run.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
"So this idea may be useful in 3rd world countries where power grids are not available."
Ranting for no good cause. That's EXACTLY where it is aimed at, anyway. May I also point out that lifting those weights is not going to produce signficant enegy usage that someone is going to have to change their diet in the richer parts of the world. Don't forget that one of the biggest problems in the wealthy world is OVER eating not undereating!
22.6 Kg x 1m x 9.8 m/s^2 / 4 hours = 0.015W if conversion is 100% efficient (which it won't be)
The red led on the front of your modem requires around this amount so the glow will be feable. To get the equivalent of a filament 40W bulb requires around 10W so the system is only around a factor of 1000 out.
wot no sig
What about using the concept on a larger scale to power more "things" in the home. Everyone could have one in their back yard and each morning you turn it over and viola!, you can toast your buns on a cold day.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Sounds more like a gravity-assisted battery that stores the energy used to flip the weights. Still a cool idea, but saying that it's a "gravity powered lamp" is a bit inaccurate.
Assume: 12 Watts for 8 Hours/day, weight travels a vertical distance of 1 meter.
Calculation:
12 (J/s) * 1200 (s/day) * 365 (day/year) * 200 (year) = 1051.2 MJ
PE (J) = mgh = m (kg) * 9.81 (m / s**2) * 1 (m)
m = ~107 Mkg
Good luck with that...
Got me thinking about how, in a two-story house, there's all sorts of vertical movement. I was picturing a way to step on a platform (sort of like those that parking lot attendants sometimes use) to ride from the second floor to the first. That buffered ride down could throw some energy into a flywheel. And, how about all of the greywater from upstairs? Three people taking their morning showers send many pounds of water down a vertical path to ground level. I wonder if passing that through some sort of screw drive might give up a few watts.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
So now we just build one 200 feet tall, and an array of 5000 of them, and we eliminate out energy problems forever!
Build them in Kansas. They don't believe in gravity there anyway, so they won;t see them.
(a) weight of 1 kilogram, height difference of 1 meter, what is the potential energy difference?
(b) how much energy used by LEDs to produce 600 lumen during 4 hours?
(c) how much kilograms needed to power these LEDs?
-JAB
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120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
How much energy do you think it takes to mine, smelt, cast and finish the 50 pounds worth of weights needed to power this thing. How about to create and assemble the drive shaft, generator, and extra housing for all if it. Then to ship it all that mass to the store and carry it home.
What do you think the payback period would be compared to just using the high-efficiency LEDs with a power cord?
It is not a concept which is going to revolutionise anything but neither the creator or the design committee claims that. It is much more of a niche item and something a fair few people would consider buying one of for the house as a design/fashion item (something most of us slashdotters probably doesn't understand). It is overall an innovative and interesting bit of industrial design which could well prove popular.
Is it worthy of a patent? Well, I'm always sceptical about patents in general, but the idea itself seem no worse than a lot of other patented designs.
E = mgh = 271 J
Assume LEDs 100% efficient and standard lightbulb 2% efficient: 2% of 40W is 0.8W.
0.8W * 4 hrs * 3600 s/hr = 11520 J.
Have I made some horrible miscalculation or are they claiming over 4000% efficiency for this device.
A lot of energy is probably wasted to watch family guy and similar activities. This lamp is greener than a powered light, because people generally consume too much food (energy) anyway, this is energy that would likely go to waste. Besides, after sitting in a desk all day, a little weight lifting won't hurt anyone. ;)
You sir, are correct.
.....3.8 lumens. A candle is ...13 lumens. So it's about a third of a candle. An ideal light source is ~680 lumens/watt would be 13 lumens, or a candle.
There's 50lbs of weight that fall about 4ft, if I'm reading the diagrams right. That's 200 ft-lbs. Which comes out to... hmm... 0.075 watt-hours. Over 4 hours that means 0.019 watts continuous power. From memory really good blue LEDs are around 200 lumens/watt so
To get ~700 lumen light at 200 lumen/watt would require 3.5 watts of power, over 4 hours is 14 watt-hours or 3700 ft-lbs. Over 4ft of fall that amounts to 925 lbs. My goodness, that is a group effort.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
In America, the energy doesn't come from food, it comes from fatrolls. So this not only decreases your electricity usage, it improves your car's MPG and reduces the likelihood of needing to manufacture insulin shots.
Now all we have to do is make the weights out of hypercompressed CO2 and it's a total win.
And other camping trips. Cool! Maybe could power a telescope's clock drive. Lots of cool uses.
The idea of lifting weights to produce energy might be fine for a lamp but doing an hour or two of work a day to power your home would be wasteful. The energy cost to produce the extra food you would need to eat would be far greater than just taking it from the power company in the first place.
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=cost+of+calories+fossil+fuel&num=100
That said, if you are going to work out anyway, why not store the spent energy somehow for later use. I think with companies like nanosolar(www.nanosolar.com) producing cheaper than coal solar panels right now we'll start to see power distribution models where selling back to the grid is supported.
Yes, but how do you turn it off?
still no sig
seems a bit suspect to me so I'm going to try going through the maths
4ft = 1.2m, the LEDs, being slightly generous I'll say consume 5W. 5*60*60*4 (total power he claims it uses) = 72000J. Work = force * Distance so 72000/1.2 = 60,000N. translating that into Kg that's a 6100kg weight needed for that much energy (assuming 100% efficiency)!
Is my science/maths flawed or has the guy in question simply not done his figures?
People tend to eat too much anyway, this is energy that will go to waste watching TV, or builds up as fat.
Turning on the lights could just mean a few minutes less spent at the gym.
If we really want be green ourselves, we should watch everything we eat, and do. Wasted food = wasted energy and enviromental degradation.
If we rigged this up to the Total Gym, Chuck Norris could power the entire country in just 20 minutes a day for low low payments of $19.95.
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Wouldn't it be cool if one could reset the device simply by flipping it over (hourglass style), rather than having to use some mechanism to reset the weight to the top of the device?
Just a thought.
Huh?
OK, can someone tell me where my calculation is wrong:
The designer's diagram shows 50lbs of weight falling 58 inches. Google tells me in metric that's about 23kg falling 1.5m; under the force of gravity (9.8N/kg), that gives a total potential energy of 23*1.5*9.8 Joules—call it 350J to be generous.
Now, the claim is that this thing outputs 600-800 lumens of light. Let's assume that LEDs can put out 200 lumens per watt of electricity delivered—this is apparently quite generous. That means the LEDs will need at least 3 watts of electricity to give out that amount of light.
As everyone here knows, 3 watts is 3 joules/second—meaning our total of 350J will last slightly less than two minutes; this is substantially less than the claimed four hours!
Either my number-crunching is wrong (in which case I'd be delighted to be enlightened—excuse the puns), or this device ain't ever going to do what it claims...
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Yeah the notion that people could still be trying to patent escapement mechanisms that are totally derivative of fifteenth century designs is revolting. But whater. I'm not saying that applies to this particular design because I didn't spend much time looking at it, but it seemed like an opportune moment to pose a question I've had about escapement regulated energy storage systems for a long time.
A few years ago I was somewhat randomly cruising around some java simulator sites and got intereted in some pendulum applets and I ended up getting side tracked on the fascinating history of escapement mechanisms which are the part of a mechanical clockwork system that, through the motion of the pendulum, regulates the release of energy. Really fun stuff and I'm sure many Slashdot readers know it well so I'd like to pose a question to those who are familiar with this kind of classic mechanical stuff.
Reading about ancient mechanical clocks made me wonder why this isn't a more popular energy storage system. Searching through patents I found that actually this is a very busy area with tons of active patents much to my surprise. There are patents with some cool ideas like using entire buildings as the weight in a pendulum and escapement storage system. Fascinating though perhaps impractical for various reasons.
But the question is about what formulas one could use to create estimates for such a system. I found this one:
PE=mgh
In which
PE = Potential Energy in Joules
m = mass in Kg
g = acceleration w/s squared
h = height in meters
First of all, is this an approriate formula to use for a traditional clockwork mechanism? ("Traditional" in this case meaning a large weight attached to a gear train that connects to a pendulum that operates an escapement and thus regulates the release of energy.)
And if it is, then how does this result sound to you?
10,000 kilos (Sounds like a lot but it's only bout four cubic yards of concrete) at one meter falling at a rate of 0.0001 meter per second (an unrealistic rate but I'm keeping this numerically simple) equals 1J. Is that right or is this an inappropriate application of the formula?
Now I realize that this is not accounting for friction which is going drastically alter the real world result, but just as a ballpark estimator of maximum potential is this an accurate way to go?
If only the machines in The Matrix knew this...
I like basketball!!1!
He might not, but from what I gather, it's something like this:
PGE = m*g*h (potential gravitational energy in joules = mass * gravity * height)
50 lbs = 22.7 kg
PGE = 22.7 * 9.81 * 1.5 (I'm assuming a generous height of about 1.5 meters here, based on his diagram which gives 58" as the height)
PGE = about 334 joules
A joules is one watt-second, so 334 joules means 334 watts for one second, or 1 watt for 334 seconds.
According to Wikipedia, "The highest efficiency high-power white LED is claimed by Philips Lumileds Lighting Co. with a luminous efficacy of 115 lm/W (350 mA)." The claims is that this light can produce 600-800 lumens. If we take the lower number, 600, that breaks down to about 5 1-watt super-efficient LEDs to produce about 600 lumens.
So that's 5 watts per second, which with energy of 334 joules yields about 66 seconds of output. A far cry from 14,400 seconds (four hours).
Feel free to correct my math, it's been years since I've taken physics.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Is this as efficient as a pendulum? Clocks have been functioning without electricity for hundreds of years, so I'd look to clock crafters for efficiency metrics.
I haven't RTFA, but I imagine the 200 years is a realiability number, meaning it wouldn't break if you flipped it over twice a day, every day, for 200 years. It is supposed to provide light for 4 hours on a flip, which as another early poster calculated, probably isn't realistic either, but at least closer to realistic than 8 hours of light for 200 years.
Maybe those who could afford it could buy laborers to lift the weights. Beyond the initial investment only minimal food would be required! I feel like a Conservative! Wishing for the good old days!
FAIL!
It is unlikely that this device will make me eat any more than I do already.
So it makes me a tiny bit fitter, and is green.
If it looks too good to be true... The energy stored by the weights is 271 joules, which spread over 4 hours is 19mW. If the entire system were 100% efficient, including the lamps, you'd get about 13 lumens.
Might want to check your math. . . either that or you're located on a small moon/asteroid somewhere.
He could've made this even greener by incorporating a small bird or monkey whose job it was to crank this to the top. This way, the people of the world are motivated to preserve wildlife so that they can read novels at night.
That's not a picture of a real lamp. It's a "concept illustration" generated in some CG program.
There may be an actual prototype, but it's not as good looking. Although I have suspicions about that image; the shadows are inconsistent and the inside corners don't show a dark band.
I used this to help my wife with her addiction to TV. She has a small one that only draws
around 35W, but being constantly on is a large drain on our solar power system. As she used
an exercise bike quite a lot, I substituted the brakes with an efficient generator (PM servo motor from an old
DEC LA 30, no need to cheat here).
To make a long story short, you've never seen someone stop so quick on a commercial break! Even adding a battery
(not so efficient, these) so she could pedal like the dickens for awhile, then rest, didn't help.
Of course, human dynamics being what they are...I wound up adding more solar panels and batteries to the main system.
So, she's returned to getting stupider and fatter...and no, she left the room while I typed this, and can't see why
computers could be entertaining, so I'm not busted yet.
Wow... I'm sure you meant well, but as a VT grad that post comes off as very condescending. To myself and tens of thousands of other hokies, Virginia Tech is not just another descriptor for massacre. There are tons of great things about Virginia Tech that we would much rather be associated with than the tragic shooting. I understand that it will always be a part of our history and it's not something that should be forgotten, but it's not necessary to bring it up every time we make the news (which happens often because there's tons of cool research going on in Blacksburg, VA).
Just to nit pick, there is no excess energy. You are burning energy to power this stuff. Sorta like running an exercise machine by the power of the person using it...
The description of this lamp on the Core77 site is completely unrealistic.
.088 Wh, or .022 W over the rated 4 hour runtime. A modern LED is 150 lumens/watt, so you should be able to generate 3.3 lumens for 4 hours.
.022 W. I fail to see how the inventor plans to meet his goal of 600-800 lumens, unless he is secretly planning to increase gravity.
The last time I checked, gravity was 9.8 m/s^2, so allowing 23 kg to fall 1.4 m could theoretically generate 320 J, if we ignore losses in the electrical conversion. That's
LEDs are constantly improving, but even a perfect light source would only produce about 15 lumens from
These numbers look right. 1 HP is 550 foot lbs per second. There are 745 watts in 1 HP.
If he uses 50 lbs over a 4 foot drop then this is 200 foot lbs per 4 hours or 50 foot lbs per hour. 50 / 3600 is 0.0139 HP * 745 = 10.34 watts. Given the mechanical efficiency of his generator this should power a small CFL or LED without issue.
Now the thing is that for an off grid house, something like this might make a great deal of sense. One can increase the height by using a block and tackle and increase the weight. If we say got to 550 LBS over a height of say 20 feet then we have 13.75 times the energy and this will produce 142 watts for 4 hours.
Off grid this could run enough lighting for the evening. It could power some low power appliances as well. 142 watts for 5 hours is worth about 5.68 cents at 10 cents per Kilowatt hour. This doesn't sound like much, but the issue is that it might only take a few minuets to hoist the weight with a block and tackle (or horse!).
Furthermore one can use say a windmill to provide the energy and lift it by hand only when needed.
Note that water stored in a large tank might make more sense than a mechanical system.
I don't think one would want to back pack this in on a camping trip.
Another energy store would be to pressurize air. One just needs efficient pumps.
50lbs == 22.6 kg
.019 W
4 ft == 1.21 m
PE = mgh = 22.6 kg * 1.21 m * 9.8 m/s^2 ~= 270 J
Expended over 4 hours, thats
A GOOD white LED (the kind that really is equivelent to a good lightbulb), such as used in a Mag Lite flashlight, is 3W.
So either time, mass, or distance are off by a good order of magnitude.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Well, I'm sure if it can power a bank of LEDs, it can power an LCD clock module.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
6x10^9W. Rotational energy of the earth 10^29J. Time to spin down ~5x10^19seconds. or about 10^11 years.
We may be safe.
So they've taken the concept of a wind up or grandfather clock and turned it into a lamp? Damn it! Why didn't I do that?
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Please correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this lamp powered by the user? The user has to do the work to move the weights into the correct position. The system can't get out any more energy than was used to set the system up. So I expend an amount of energy E, therefore the power system can only generate a proportional amount of energy xE where (0 = x = 1). This is not my specialty, so any physicists out there have any useful comments?
Sorry, should have used preview button. That is xE where (0 less than or equalto x less than or equal to 1).
Whoops. Wrong.
I'm replying to my own email. Sorry!
550 lbs over an hour will yield the numbers I posted. 55 LBS will yield 1/10 of the above.
He doesn't have 10.34 watts. He has (50/550)/3600 = 2.5253E-5 HP * 745 = 0.019 watts.
This won't provide much light.
550 lbs dropping 20 feet in 1 hour is (550/550)*20/3600*745 = 4 watts for an hour.
So, your math is okay but your reading skills are a bit off. I wonder if this is an example of the 'Group Think' mentioned a few days ago. One guy says 'Hey, the math is wonky' and everyone joins in.
Instead of having a 50 pound weight, why not have a much lower mass spring provide the equivalent pull?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
How do you turn it off ?
The LEDs in products like this are either blue or UV LEDs coated with a phosphorous (not entirely unlike fluorescent bulbs).
Since this particular lamp emits too much blue, I would wager that it uses a blue indium-gallium-nitride LED.
Increasing the phosphorous coating would make the resulting color more yellow and thus negate any need to wait 15 years.
The most commonly used phosphorous emits in the 580nm range (yellow), while the blue diode itself emits light at around 470nm (blue, surprisingly).
Human power should be sufficient to keep all portable electronic devices running indefinately - phones, music players, laptops, etc.
Hey, that's actually pretty funny and mocks the entire subject of this sub-thread appropriately. Mod this one up from the troll depths!
It looks nice and all, but what about the other winners? http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/greener_gadgets_design_competition_results_8851.asp
If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0.
I never won a green prize for that.
I guess I was ahead of my time.
All I remember was.. the brakes didn't work, and I felt pain for 2 weeks.
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Simply building and shipping the 50 pound thing will probably consume more energy than it saves in its entire life. You are better off simply buying a high efficiency LED screw in bulb which are available right now for much less and do work.
... did anyone figure out how much energy it takes to produce gravity?????
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Several others have done the math and shown how the numbers given for this 2nd place device just don't add up, and it was all basic physics.
Really, what kind of clowns are judging this competition? Does anyone have anything that exonerates the judges and organizers from the charge of being idiots?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
This incident should be deeply embarrassing for Virginia Tech, which actually does employ some reputable professors and produces some educated students. However, this nonsense comes from a student in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies, where a grasp of physical reality is clearly not a graduation requirement.
As other posters have observed, the energy generated by a 25 kg mass descending two meters is several orders of magnitude away from the 50 Watt-hours or so needed to generate the claimed light output. A careful reading of the breathless Va Tech press release shows that it's mostly written in the future, a key hint that the device doesn't actually exist.
But that's not important in a DESIGN contest, where the objective is to imagine something that looks cool and makes an uninformed audience coo with delight. Considerations like "can is possibly work?", "can it be manufactured?", or "is its cost plausible?" are far distant from such endeavours.
For fun, let's look at some of the other entries. First place goes to the Ener-Jar. It's an undeniably cute (but clearly not manufacturable) gadget that—get this—measures AC power consumption. Wow. What a groundbreaking idea. Too bad the people who make the Kill-A-Watt have been making something like it—but a lot more useful—for a decade or so. But the EnerJar is a DIY project, so that makes it a cute design winner.
Or this novelty, the Bambus. It's a USB memory stick that's recyclable because, err, it's made of bamboo. I suppose this isn't a bad idea (and it "will age in a nice way and will therefore become more likable over time"), but saving the earth by encasing USB devices in bamboo seems like a pretty slow payoff. Maybe this bamboo cellphone has more appeal.
I think my favorite is the digital tattoo interface. I'm not sure what this implanted device has to do with saving energy, except that it incorporates a "blood-powered fuel cell". The girl "demonstrating" it doesn't look too happy; maybe she's having second thoughts about bio-compatible materials.
We shouldn't be too hard on these ideas—some of them might actually be practical, although they mostly seem to recycle well-understood ambient energy notions in applications that suffer from an orders-of-magnitude mismatch between production and consumption. There are some good industrial designers, who do understand physics and engineering, and maybe one of these kids will grow up to be one.
And that's why, in the real world, people use real measuring units. We have 22.7kg falling through 1.47m under an acceleration of 10ms-2, giving 333.69J of energy. Over 4 hours, that is 23.2 milliwatts.
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that the user has to lift and drop the 50lb weight 170 times before the LED will be illuminated. To publicly display the lamp, and fool the contest people, I'm sure the lamp was charged (by lifting the weight 169 times or by directly charging the lamp's battery) before the contest with a charge just below that required to light the LED.
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You doubt the power of His Noodly Appendage?
Obviously this was competition of design and not engineering. Great design and concept, if it worked. But the engineering is impossible unless you accept that you have to get up every 60 seconds to re-energize the lamp. The contest itself looks to have been all about concept. It only required submission of a 500 word description and some drawings.
Interestingly in a video on the site the judging panel criticized a crank lamp because it wouldn't run long on the energy a human could put into a crank, actually citing watt figures required. But they didn't make a peep about how much power would be required to run this lamp for four hours. Possibly the green community has a lot of experience with the difficulty of getting much energy from hand cranks and pedals. However, the limited power in a dropping weight seems to have escaped their notice. Lifting a fifty pound weight isn't magically easier and more efficient than pedaling a generator.
An ideal green source at 100% efficiency, according to wikipedia, comes in at 685 lumens/watt. Which works out to 550 lbs for a four-hour burn (at 40W equivalent, which they're claiming). That's the design limit: you can't get better than 100% efficiency, and you really don't want your light source to be a delta function, anyway.
So if they've got 4hrs of 50 lbs @ 40W equivalent, they've got some kind of over-unity LEDs in there. Put those side-by-side with normal, high-efficiency photovoltaics in an optoisolator and connect the leads the way you're not supposed to and you don't even need the weight!
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I dunno what crazy math you are doing but your calculations are way off. At 58" (1.47 m) the device will output 1.35 watts:
W = ( N * m ) / s
N = kg * ( m / s^2 )
N = 22.6 * 9.8 = 221.48
W = ( 221.48 * 1.47 ) / 240
W = 1.353
I also don't know WTF you're talking about 150 lumens / watt. Many white LEDs output 300 and up lumens / watt.
In short this is totally doable.
Your story reminds me of the time when I turned an ordinary bicycle into a gravity-powered superbike. I still have a scar from that one.
Legalize it.
Exactly. That is what the "Apple" section is for.
Why is it that the fastest runner in the world cannot hold a candle to the fastest cyclist? This concept shows, if you would bother to read it, a gear in the base with a 1:160 ratio. Thus, at perfect efficiency, the weight is not falling 48-54 inches, rather the motion would be transferred 160-fold - thus 7680-8640 inches (640-720 foot equivalent)
This seems to be in line with what you are all arguing. Change your math(s) from a drop of 48" to 7680" - I'll bet it becomes more feasible.
I'm not saying that this is possible today, or should be rushed into mass production. But don't blindly hate on it, or dismiss it simply because you do not bother to read all about it first.
Wait a minute - this is Slashdot. Flame away, since you did not think of it first.
I think the people above me are having sex - or they're sleeping restlessly and agreeing with each other a lot.
The first prize winner seems MUCH more interesting: An open-source design for an energy meter.
See here
Basically, he's gonna provide the design specs to build your own kill-a-watt
So, it's:
And no interest whatsoever on Slashdot? WTF?
There are already drain water heat recovery systems in existance.
http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumer/your_home/water_heating/index.cfm/mytopic=13040
http://www.gfxstar.ca/specifications.htm
As pointed out by some other posters, kinetic or potential energy recovery might lead to the nasty problem of clogged pipes, but thermal energy recovery doesn't have that problem.
It might not have much to do with your point, but to give you an idea of the scale of our mercury problem, 50 lbs of mercury is roughly the yearly output of an unscrubbed, medium-sized (100-500 MW) power plant. If you've ever ridden over a coal pile, it is mind blowing to think that there's only a few cubic inches of the stuff in the whole damn hill.
As you can imagine, it's not terribly easy to measure in the flue gas.
Maybe someone could invent a couch potato or laptop computer potato lamp/generator for use while sitting all day at your computer. Since a typical couch potato weighs in at 200 to 300+ lbs it would be quite an energy source.
Freeplay's been making stuff powered by fairly hefty but still child-crankable watch spring technology for a long time: http://www.freeplayenergy.com/products
I bought a Freeplay radio back in the early 90s when they were still made in S Africa.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
RTFA: http://www.core77.com/competitions/greenergadgets/projects/4306/greener_gadgets_03.jpg
It runs on current generated from gravity moving 12 Neodymium Magnets.
Mainly because the batterioes can't go flat when the kids play with them or the switch is bumped on in your backpack etc etc. A quick wind for ten seconds and you have light for a minute. Wind for a couple of minutes and you have light for 15 minutes or more.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Actually, it's an embarrasment - this thing is completely and utterly infeasible, and provable as such by any high school physics student.
I'm embarrassed for my alma mater, and have already sent an email to the addresses listed on the article suggesting that they take the article down. Or at least let the architecture dept. claim it as their own.
Great, I can't wait to give one of these to my gramma. She's always sitting around complaining about being sore. Well, this will get her in shape! Even setting it up should be exciting. I hope that rickety nightstand she has can handle the weight... it's already full of old coins, moth balls and jars of preserves.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
it was left out of the article, but you're supposed to use 50 lbs. of coal for the weight and light it on fire.
This device isn't powered by gravity, it's powered by people. Gravity only stores the energy for slow release, like a capacitor.
I always spent a good deal of my childhood attempting to design a perpetual motion machine in my head since I was told it was impossible.
I often imagined something just like this, only it was submerged in water, air was let in from the bottom and buoyancy was used to carry the weight back to the top. Now if only we could break the laws of pressures and fluids. . .
You're absolutely right. Because the last thing we need is a device that requires us to exert any effort or exercise in any way. It would be devastate the MooMoo industry.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
I see a lot of math involving what the power output should be expected to be.
All of you are giving a height of 2m, but what you're not factoring in is the ball-screw.
This is obviously threaded, and the weight travels much further than 2m in it's descent.
The coarsness of the thread and diameter of the screw will determine the actual distance.
I thought people were smart here?
I love the kender, they are the funniest thing ever thought of.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
The title of my post: "It's nice to see good news from Virginia Tech"
:)
All I was trying to say is that for those of us out here in the rest of the country, the thing that put VT on the map was the mass killings. It's a sad association, just as the name Columbine has come to be associated with a similar unfortunate event. I'm sorry if you feel that's condescending because it certainly was not meant that way.
Your sensitivity actually implies that for you, the massacre is very much at the top of your agenda and you are on some sort of mission to erase it from people's consciousness and replace it with a recognition of the school's academic achievements. Well guess what, that's precisely my point.
I'm sure VT is a fine school and that's my basic point--look at this brilliant idea this student came up with (its practicality has been questioned by others in this forum, but I would definitely buy one). Anyway... have a nice day.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Yeah, but did it have headlights?
I have to exert force & expend energy to stand up or to hold a mass in a stationary position. Why can't Gravity be harnessed as an energy source without moving parts? Gravity has enough power to bend light & heat the center of the earth to ~7000 Celsius. It is a constant force pulling on us, why can't that force be harnessed directly?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Meh, just chuck some magnets in it on a slight diagonal slant down the side of the device.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
So when carbon nanotubes are perfected and connect the surface of the earth to outer space we can use them to drop things (like minerals we'll be mining from the moon and elsewhere in the solar system) from space back to earth much like this lamp drops its load and generate electricity the whole way down and eliminate the need for burning fossil fuels ever again. World's energy problems, solved.
say good-by to plug-in table lamps! heck, if they can figure out a way to make it convenient, you could probably work out a mechanism for a ceiling light.
"Well, I was wrong, the lizards (monkeys) are a Godsend."
"But isn't that a little short sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?"
"No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snake. They'll wipe out the lizards."
"But...aren't the sneakes even worse?"
"Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that lives on snake meat."
"But then we're stuck with gorillas!"
"No, that's the beautiful part. When winter time rolls around the gorillas simply freeze to death."
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
A monochrome LCD screeen powered by rabid red ants?
Actually, gee gosh, it's a power usage meter of some sort.
Considering the prize money, it would be folks who probably don't have the engineering, scientific or marketing savy necessary to succeed in the real world. Most folks around here could probably come up with a couple cool concepts.
I have one: reduce plastic in packaging. Another one: install motion sensors in office floor at key location and connect them to the lights in grids after 7pm; instant savings for everyone. Plus some cool effects as you work late and go to the washroom, lights just turn on ahead of you.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Why not just siphon out some of that HYDROGEN from your car's gas tank and use it to power a small portable fuel-cell to power your lamp.
And the lamp can even be an old incandescent! None of that Mercury pollution like flourescents have.
Forget this silly LED stuff. Lots of power from groovy new HYDROGEN!
Heck we'll all be using these HYDROGEN vehicles in the next five years!
But be careful- don't burn your lips when you suck the wonderful clean HYDROGEN out of the gas tank!
And don't mix HYDROGEN with Pinoqachole- it's explosive!
.
- aqk
F U
Obviously a good idea - (1) Obviously we could use our leftover muscle power (we foolishly and anti-Darwinly use it doing something called "working out"), not f*ssil f*el. (2) years ago I planned to live on a cliff in the Azores and I imagined the Atlantic swell rising the vertical cliffs would lift me a float-weight, which would spiral down a central pole rhythmically and easily generating - electricity. Why have no inventors come up with this obvious harness of wave power since I invented it in 1978? (Instead I went to Brazil.) Eh? I would seriously like to see some of the things I have invented take shape - e.g. moving pictures on paper (i.e. in books and magazines)(which I conceived at age about 10); sun-powered blimps for transport in hot climes; the useful house: "hundreds of little rat-shaped vacuum cleaners" (delivering dust to a water runnel under the wainscoating to carry away debris) (the rats have to have sharp noses for corners, not be round robots); "dining table that withdraws to the ceiling"; All obvious stuff, no?... Suggestions / production proposals welcome.. sf@miracleread.com
same basic principal.
Even in a 3rd world you would need to hoist a 550 lbs weight up an 18 foot tower every hour in order to provide 5 watts for the hour. This is 1/200th of a kilowatt hour which is worth about 10 cents in the developed world. We can produce a kilowatt hour of power from nuclear sources for about 2 cents.
You can think of it this way as well. Every hour hoist a 55 gallon drum of water up an 18 foot tower and you will not get enough energy to run a single low energy compact flourescent bulb.
Why everybody assumes that human power is "green"? As we all know, eneregy is not created or destroyed, it merely changes its "shape" (pardon for awkwardness). To lift the weights, I need to spend energy, this energy comes from me eating a steak or pizza or bunch of vegetables. In order for me to get that bit of food in my mouth, I have to go to the cafeteria (maybe releasing methane in process or even *gasp* driving a car to it!!). Then the food itself is first prepared (boiled or cooked), consuming power and energy again. Add more energy consumption ad nausea.
Perhaps, with all that accounted, it would be greener to just flip an electricity switch (not to mention, more convenient)?
Lone Gunmen crew.
4 feet is sligthly over a meter, let's assume that this means the difference between high and low position of the mass is 1 meter. Falling one meter generates G*m joules, or 10J/kg aproximately.
4 hours is 14400 seconds. If you want to produce a -SINGLE- watt for 4 hours by a mass falling one meter, then the mass needs to be aproximately 1500kgs, which is over 3300 pounds, which you couldn't lift, and which wouldn't fit in the "lamp" anyway.
Furthermore, a -single- watt of led-lightning can NOT infact, produce the same light as 40-60W of incadescent. LEDs are a lot more efficient, but not -THAT- much more efficient.
This assumes the power can be converted to electrictiy with an efficiency of 100% which is certainly -also- not going to be the case.
Realistic numbers look less useful:
It's not a lot. If you want the lamp to stay on for an hour, the most you can use is a 0.1W LED, this will provide -some- light, but it won't be anywhere NEAR a 40W incadescent, nor will it stay on for 4 hours (for this you'd need to go down to a 0.025W LED.
You guys should check out the man's thesis! I especially enjoyed his "design" for a thousand-year technology: a (powered) recording lamp with a web front-end! He neglects to address any real issues with its functionality, like format incompatibilities, degradation of components, connectability, etc. The man appears to have confused having "wouldn't it be cool if..." ideas with actual design.
Ow... ouch... doh! ow.. oo.. ow...
just turn on the new light, honey.
What light?
that, lift up the weight, let go, and it'll turn on!
Where is it?
This lamp appears to be powered by food, which is in effect powered by mostly solar energy. Humans eat plants and animals, the animals we eat feed on plants... so, plants. Plants are powered by the sun and chemicals from the ground. There would be some fossil fuel involved in getting the plants and animals to the humans, but the bulk is still solar. i spose we could say that fossil fuel is also composed of plants and therefore again say... solar. But anywho, the energy is not coming from gravity, but from people. Energy coming from a waterfall/dam is also solar. The sun lifts the water, imparting potential energy, water falls as rain above the turbine, water falls down and turns the wheel. Without the solar input the dam would stop producing energy when the water level goes below the turbines. Gravity is just the catalyst turning the potential energy into kinetic.
/iana science type //haven't had enough caffeine
A gravity powered light could be some sort of piezoelectric system, where the weight of the house smooshes a crystal causing it to pulse, then using that pulse to generate light.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
*sigh* It's a living.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
posted at http://pesn.com/2008/02/19/9500471_Gravity_Lamp/
(for a better, more exciting lighting solution, see: http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:MPK_Co's_Litroenergy )
From: Clay Moulton
To: Sterling D. Allan
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008 5:59 AM
Subject: Re: re Gravia clock by Clay Moulton
Good morning Mr. Allan,
If there's any question as to the legitimacy of the competition now, I have offered to graciously concede the 2nd place win, as well as any winnings. My job now is to figure out a better design, plain and simple. I made an estimation based on feedback I got during the design process, and that estimation was shown to be incorrect.
see remainder of comment at http://pesn.com/2008/02/19/9500471_Gravity_Lamp/
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
Not mine. 2 watts. 200mW with the backlight off (sunlight readable).
http://www.laptop.org/
I have often thought of using a boyant weight system to generate power the same way!
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.