A few days back I wrote about the Fluxxlab design proposal to harvest energy from revolving doors. Managing to install standalone energy producing devices is a significant event, much like when the first solar panels hit the market in the past. Therefore, I have decided to write a two part series, the first part is about obstacles to widespread use, part 2 is for now a viable and necessary option.
Despite the initial enthusiasm, energy harvesting is an old idea that has stayed on paper and is only now gaining some momentum. Car braking systems that recuperate energy to charge batteries are only now starting to appear in mass production and represent a very obvious application. As concepts, designers and engineers will seek more new applications for buildings and transport, it is inevitable that they are going to run against some hefty problems that need to be solved. Here is a few:
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Energy availability: Like in the revolving door’s case, the energy source is neither continuous, nor of the same intensity. In other words, some of the time -in some cases most of the time- it is not possible to produce any energy at all, and during the periods when harvesting is possible things are not rosy with a well determined input.
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Energy conversion: Energy harvesting is useless if we do not convert the available kinetic or other form of energy to useful electric energy. The efficiency of this conversion has to be pretty high, especially when we have short bursts of production. Most systems only work well under certain conditions, for example when mechanical revolutions are constant, or when wave patterns are regular. In many cases, for example when harvesting kinetic energy from random vibrations, it is awfully difficult to convert this random pattern in regularly flowing energy. The same when we have kinetic energy in the form of rotations, in which case frequency control is a major issue. Read the rest of this entry »
