Slashdot Mirror
Energy-Generating Floors To Power Subway Displays In Tokyo
Jason Sahler writes "When the East Japan Railway Company (JR East) decided to invest in alternative energy sources, it only had to look to its users for the perfect source of energy. Recently the company decided to update their Tokyo Station with a revolutionary new piezoelectric energy generating floor. The system will harvest the kinetic energy generated by crowds to power ticket gates and display systems."
Will I be compensated with lower fares for the reduction of my kinetic & potential energies, or will they just take it as profit?
I can just imagine the batteries draining and the users not familair with the system getting off of a train to find there is no way to exit the gates.
Of course, they'll then stomp their feet in anger - hopefully hard enough to blink the ticket gates functional again.
Ah - innovation.
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
I have a hard time believing that installing thousands of tiny peizoelectric generators in the floor to be either a) better for the environment or b)profitable.
I would bet that the cost to the environment in producing these special devices, would be greater than the coal that would have been fed into a coal power plant to produce the same amount of power.
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
It may be a joke that they are stealing PE and KE, but they really are making it slightly harder to walk around. Thus the user will be doing more work- ie- burning more calories.
Is this a totally independent outbreak of imbecility, or is it related to the SD article from ~2002?
This piezoelectric idea is never going to recover the initial cost of construction and installation.
To generate real amounts of power at near zero cost, just let the people walk up the escalator and harness the power of the steps going backwards.
"The ticket will cost 100 yen and 5 jumping jacks."
There are forklifts driving back and forth on the production floor here at my place of work. If those 10,000 lb forklifts carrying 2,000 lb loads were driving over piezoelectric energy generating floors, how much energy could be harnessed? Certainly not enough to offset the cost in the short term, which is the only term my employer seems to comprehend.
Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
You're wrong, and to prove it, I'll make a supposition with no factual basis whatsoever: I would bet that the cost to the environment in producing these special devices will be far less than the coal that would have to be fed into a coal power plant to produce the same amount of power.
was there ever any doubt that something involving humans living their entire lives hooked up to machines via tentaclelike hoses *wouldnt* come from japan? :-p
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
The article talks about a 25 square meter area producing 1400 kW per day.
This sounds highly unlikely.
Steve
You would be shocked by the potential of this technology. It has the capacity to replace large amounts of electrical expenses. Much like you, I'd be revolted if they did not make the best use of this technology!
"The system will harvest the kinetic energy generated by crowds..."
No, it will harness the POTENTIAL energy change in the compression of the floor plates by a distance D with force F. The energy lost by the person and gained by the floor (neglecting efficiency losses) would then be F * D.
Bad summary, Bad
There is truth in humor.
How does it hold up against massive quantities of urine?
just imagine how much energy can be harvested this way the next time Godzilla rampages! Energy independence, AND the project will pay for itself in about a 40 minute feature film. Of course, then you have to rebuild it and wait for the next rampage for the new project to pay off...
More music, fewer hits
Just stewing this over in my brain I was astonished by the possibilities.
Human activity follows a semi-diurnal cycle and in something like a subway station your peak generating capacity would be when masses of people are using the stations, let's say from 6 am to 9 am, 4 pm to 6 pm. Wherever this technology is applied you would need a certain level of foot traffic to make it cost effective.
Imagine this on the floors of airline terminals, sports stadiums, very busy downtown areas (sidewalks in the New York business district). You could even apply this to very busy interstates or near toll plazas.
The real stretch of imagination; think about building seawalls covered in a piezoelectric material where the constant wave action generates electricity. Even wind motion (variable winds, not constant winds where windmills are really the best solution) where you can generate electricity by the loading/unloading of force and strain through a piezoelectric mechanism.
Getting the price-point down low enough can make this an excellent contributor to power generation worldwide. If they covered the grounds around Mecca they could generate megawatts of power during the Haj.
Tisha Hayes
Say what?! Japan has only one commercial maglev line in the whole country, which runs in Aichi-ken. It's only about 6 or 7 miles long IIRC, and has a top speed of about 65 - 70 MPH. It went into service n 2005. JR has some on their test track, though, and they are really fast. But it was just last year that JR announced they plan to start commercial maglev shinkansen service in 2025. They don't have it now because, well, the maglev rail lines haven't even been built yet. China has a maglev line running between Shanghai and somewhere; Korea also has a single maglev line, and AFAIK those are the only commercial service maglevs in Asia. Everything else is on a test track.
Also, electric != emissions-free. All passenger rail in Tokyo is electric, but that doesn't make it emissions-free. That electricity still has to be generated, and not all of it comes from nuclear plants (although much of it does; Japan probably has the highest percentage of nuclear power in the world). The emissions from an electric train are produced at the point of power generation, but they're still produced. Is that better than diesel engines on the train? Probably, but it's not emissions-free. This goes for electric cars as well. Many people mistakenly state that electric vehicles are non-polluting, but they are just non-polluting at the place where they are being driven.
Finally, maglev trains do consume quite a bit of power; it's not like making it maglev will suddenly make it an energy sipper. Sure, you gain some efficiencies from doing away with rolling friction, but you add electromagnetic resistance, and because maglev trains in development are aimed at being faster than existing rolling stock (the trains at JR's test track in Yamanashi-ken are way faster than any shinkansen currently in service), there will be increased air resistance. Expect maglev to be somewhat more power efficient than wheeled trains, but it's not going to be a power panacea.
Wait wait...I have the solution!
;-)
Install some of the piezo-things under the train and have the train roll over the tiles, creating the energy to levitate it!!!
Brilliant!
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
At first, you won't notice the extra iota of compression made by your feet against the piezo-floor-plate. But next year there will be budget cuts, and some bureaucrat will crank up the device to make the floor plates just a little bit squishier to extract just a little bit more kinetic energy... a couple of budget cycles later, it'll be like Grand Central Station, covered in mud.
...is found in the article, in this image.
They've had these things at the gates of Tokyo Station for years now. What's the news part of this? I don't even notice them when I walk across them anymore.
If JR East really wants to generate some power, they should redo the floors in Shinjuku Station -- the place is bloody huge, and is a combined station for five different rail companies (JR East, Odakyu, and Keio railways, and Toei and Tokyo subways). Average daily foot traffic for fiscal 2007 (only people walking through ticket stiles -- not counting people just passing through on the trains, or other foot traffic like walkthroughs or same-company line transfers) came to 2,666,598 for the whole station, and 785,801 for just the JR East section (each rail company has it's own sections into which only ticketed travelers may enter), with this JR East figure alone making Shinjuku Station the most travelled in the world. By contrast, Tokyo Station only had 427,824 travellers as a whole, and only 396,152 for the JR East section, or 50.4% of the traffic in the Shinjuku JR East section.
Data taken from the Japanese Wikipedia pages for the stations:
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%B0%E5%AE%BF%E9%A7%85#.E5.88.A9.E7.94.A8.E7.8A.B6.E6.B3.81 (Shinjuku)
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9D%B1%E4%BA%AC%E9%A7%85#.E5.88.A9.E7.94.A8.E7.8A.B6.E6.B3.81 (Tokyo)
If they could get cooperation from the other rail companies and redo the whole of Shinjuku Station, I'd be interested how much electrical power they could get from over 2.5mn people walking through every frikkin day. I'd hazard they could power more than just the signs. :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
If only I hadn't wasted all my mod points in Idle... Sorry AC.
How much more tiring will it be to walk on a squishy floor rather than on a rigid or resilient one?
This should have been a funny... I can't believe this happened on slashdot.. :(
Sounds awfully familiar when something is turning people into a "battery" for energy.
I might as well open up a gym and hook up electric generators to the machines so it'll keep the place lit.
Of course, this way of generating energy will only have a very tiny effect.
In essence, these systems are stealing a bit of energy from the walking crowd.
Let's assume the following: The system relies only on difference in potential energy. Say the engineers were smart and constructed an elevator that converts the potential energy of the passengers into electricity with close to 100% efficiency. For every 70kg passenger this would generate slightly under 2 watt-hours, assuming that the elevator covers a distance of 10 meters and does not take anyone upwards.
That's nice, but it's a rather irrelevant quantity in comparison to what it takes to operate the whole system. At the current costs of energy and transport, my exemplary passenger would need to cover a vertical distance of over 50 kilometers(!) to produce an amount of energy that is of equivalent value to the price of one single subway ticket.
where's all that Karma?
I didn't see it in the article, but I would really like to know who makes a piezo generator that produces the kilowatts of power they are claiming. With the commercially-available piezo energy harvesters I develop for, a playing-card sized wafer ($50) generates not much more than 10mW under ideal conditions (continuous sinusoidal vibration from a lab shaker). Wouldn't I like to get me a few of theirs! (Goodbye epaper, hello giant LED matrix...)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.