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Consider a city with one million people all walking about all day on the pavements. If everyone had small magnets in their shoes and the paving slabs had inter-connected coils cast inside, all linked to batteries, how much electricity do you reckon would be generated in one day, ready for use at night?
...or
do I not know what I'm talking about?!
Baby Power
http://www.halfbake.../idea/Baby_20Power!
another untapped energy source [mrthingy, Feb 26 2001, last modified Oct 04 2004]
The Electric Shoe Company
http://www.theelectricshoeco.com/
[sirrobin, Feb 26 2001, last modified Oct 21 2004]
(?) Wired article
http://www.wired.co....html?tw=wn_index_4
British engineers are converting street vibrations into electricity and predict a working prototype by Christmas capable of powering facility lights in the busiest areas of a city. [xaviergisz, Jul 30 2006]
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Annotation:
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I like this idea a lot. All that human energy is doing nothing but heating the sidewalk. Perhaps you could wire the sidewalks to collect the energy? |
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Or maybe: You could wire the shoes. They would have removable batteries. Your shoes would beep when the battery was full and you change batteries. |
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Then at the end of the day, you go home and put the the batteries in a power "Inlet" that sends it to the power company, who would give you a break on your electric bill depending on how much energy you saved. |
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Does that mean that someone who climbs four flights of stairs a day is starving? |
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degroof, I think there is a difference in convention for calories of heat, and calories of food. |
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But, the "calories" listed on food products are actually kilocalories, not 4.184 J. |
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This resolves the starving issue. |
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I remember reading a story about how someone calculated how you could diet simply by eating 200g of ice cubes a day. The latent heat would be supplied by your body. Their calculation was off by a factor of *one thousand*. You'd have to eat 200kg of ice cubes a day to maintain this diet. |
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The premise of "The Matrix" was wholly ridiculous. Good luck getting more energy out of a human than you put in. If you could do this, why use a matrix of unruly humans, anyway? Just use sheep. |
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Using humans as a massively parallel biological computer would have been more believable, and more ominous. |
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Francois: While the power plant portion of the premise
behind The Matrix was silly the pedant in me must point
out that *all* methods of generating electricity put out
less energy than is put in.
On the other hand, this idea, if not baked, is certainly in
the oven and getting a little crispy on one side. See The
Electric Shoe Company. |
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At the risk of sounding more pedantic than [sirrobin] I should point out that *all* methods of generating electricity output exactly the same amount of energy as is put in.
And before someone even more pedantic pipes up with "except for nuclear power", I am taking mass and energy to be equivalent here. |
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However some of the energy sources we did not have access to otherwise. Take coal for example. A lump of coal without a fire is a messy paperweight but once you burn it you release the energy. If you mine and deliver coal to a power station efficiently you should get a net gain in power, unlocking the energy of coal. However if you had to make coal before you burned it you would not gain anything and loss more. |
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In the same vein this idea would only work if the method of power was efficient and the people fed themselves. This way their self-provided calories and self-willed activity (walking) would allow a third party to generate power. Feeding people and then paying them to walk would be like making coal to burn. |
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Fantastic idea. I particularly like the idea of wiring the pavement/sidewalk to collect the shoe energy (shoenergy?) Once your shoes were fully charged, they'd beep, and you'd make your way to the nearest collection point, which would look something like a parking meter, right next to the bread and butter vendor (see http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Bread_20and_20Butter_20Vendors). Plug your shoe in by stepping onto the jack plugs, discharge, and either notch up credit from the electricity company on your bank account (the details of which are stored in your shoes) OR print out a token which may be redeemed against any number of street-delivered goods and services, including parking meters and, yes, bread and butter! Hell, the collection point could actually dispense the b&b (the ideal food for slot delivery). The perfect self-contained system; you could keep going forever like that, walking and eating all day. |
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Is there any mileage in adapting the old idea of a self-winding watch to instead of winding the watch, recharge the power supply (using a little generator). This could work for mobile phones, watches, PDA's etc. i.e most of the time these units are in your pocket and you are moving around - maybe it might work, someone have any idea on the amount of power you could actually get out of a self winding mechanism and are there actually any self charging watches out there already. |
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They already have wind up batteries... but better than that... if you wound up the ringer bell spring and vibrator motor spring.. cell phones would double thier life... the vibrator motors (usualy kept on high) and ringer sound (also usualy kept on high) drain the most battery power per use... (however they are not the only drains of power... certainly the amplifier for the microphone and the amplifier for the speaker drain a lot as well... but the thing is that the ring and vibrate still draw a conciderable ammount which could better be wasted on talking... You would need a mini solenoid to start and stop vibration/ringing... That would be strange... cell phones ringing like 1820's cowbell ringing phones... |
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I am for people power... Where could we find a bunch of people who wanted to do nothing but work all day long... How about prison... they lift weights... make the return for the weights attached to a generator axle (Mentioned in windmil axle post)... on the return, the weight slowly falls... giving the prisoner a chance to catch breath... and it turns the axle a little... hook up everything they do... |
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Make thier 100 foot walk to the cafeteria, a 1000 foot walk... using an escilator style stair collector... every ten steps up you take, you really only go 1.. on thier toilet seats... (Spring loaded lift) when they pull it down and lower it.. they send that power to the axle.. Spring collection sneakers with a 4 inch rise... 1 : 100 compression, every few hours they discharge thier shoes... |
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Throw them all in the basement... make thier commune area on the roof... every day they pick up a 50 lb backpack and climb up the 1:10 stairs and drop the pack off.. where it slowly falls back to thier cell.. spinning the axle as it falls... Giant human powered backpack wheels... |
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When the night is over... they climb another set of 1:10 stairs and DROP themselves down to thier cell floor level on an elevator style collector to turn the axle... |
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100,000 prisoners times 150 lbs times 40feet (they really walked 4000 feet total) = 600,000,000 lbs per foot... Lets be kind... lets say they only walk with those limits once a week.. or all week (devide by 7) = 85,714,285 lbs per foot... and that is not including normal spring stepping.. and weight training, and tiolet sitting, or the 50lb. backpack drop... Still, thats 15,000,000 each week that has to fall 40 feet, 20,000,000 if you only include the backpacks and the prisoners average weight. |
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sp: their, usually, considerable, woik <g>, windmill, escalator, divide and toilet. |
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the real energy in/out question is would the energy generated be greater than the energy needed to make all the metal for the pavements, |
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the prison sub-idea works better because you'd have to pave a small area and only have a small no of people to have these shoes all of whom walk mostly within the metal area. |
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British prisons used to do something similar, a hundred or so years ago. Prisoners were made to walk on treadmills all day. The trouble with the people power approach, though, is that the energy generated by people is minuscule compared to the amounts generated by power stations. Given the current low price of electricity, any such approach would be wildly uneconomical. |
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And [Francois], I had that exact same idea! Except I said they should use pigs. It would have been much more interesting if they'd been using the human brains as hardware for their computers. That would have explained why they wanted to keep them active, but not so active that they didn't have a lot of spare capacity - so the "late 20th century society" would have been a perfect cover. |
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