These boots are made for electricity
MIT students James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk won first place with the "Crowd Farm," a proposal to produce electricity through stomping feet at the Holcim Foundation Sustainable Construction competition in Japan.
Sit and step for power
(Credit: MIT)The idea is that the floor would contain a sub-floor made up of several blocks that would slightly depress when someone stepped on it. The slippage of the blocks against one another as people walked would then generate power through the principle of the dynamo, a device that converts the motion energy into that of an electric current.
A single step doesn't pack a lot of punch--it would light up a 60-watt bulb for a second or so. But thousands of commuters could light up signs. (The image here shows the inner workings of a crowd farm.)
The two also created a stool that generates power to light LEDs and installed it in a train station in Torino, Italy.
Others, such as Zhong Lin Wang at Georgia Tech, are trying to generate ambient electricity by converting mechanical energy into electricity via piezoelectric principles or temperature differentials.
- Theft by thin slice
- by steves10 July 25, 2007 6:38 PM PDT
- This 'concept', and others like it, including the roadway using the weight of cars and trucks to generate power, is nothing more than theft, albeit by small increments, of other's energy.
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- right on!
- by Efrow July 25, 2007 7:03 PM PDT
- That's right!! Thieves!! Nobody is taking MY energy!! I'm keeping it!
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- Okay......
- by beubanks7507 July 25, 2007 8:19 PM PDT
- Your post makes sense except for one, tiny, technical detail.
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(5 Comments)Since mass is being moved, however slightly, work is being done. And that work is being done in this case by the leg muscles of the people walking on the proposed platform. And where is that energy coming from? From the corn flakes (or whatever) they ate that morning, and for which they paid their own money. Sort of like a hamster in a treadmill. There's no science here, nor, actually, any 'green' energy. Just a sophisticated, thin slice, theft of energy.
You are giving away the energy. Literally. In order to do
anything, you have to do work which inherently transfers energy
to the environment. This is the cost of doing business so to
speak. Now, if someone else can capture that energy, they have
the right to. Once you do work, you give up all claim to any
energy you may have used.
Until you figure out a loop hole in the second law of
thermodynamics, don't complain.