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About LinkBacksRead more.The Environmental Transport Association claims that roads lined with piezoelectric crystals could be a future source of green power.
Read more.The Environmental Transport Association claims that roads lined with piezoelectric crystals could be a future source of green power.
Why not get it to power the roadside lighting, signage or traffic lights instead?
I realise they used the car example just to show what that energy equates to, but it really would be a pointless use of the power.
I was gonna say the same, I'd also stop kids playing on the motorway if they knew they were gonna get electrocuted
You don't get energy from nothing.
If vibrations/movement are powering this, then they are taking energy out of a car's movement, requiring them to use more fuel.
So effectively you're getting everyone else to chip in towards the cost of whatever the electricity is going to be used for, while spending lots of money and wasting energy in the conversion. Better just to have rigid roads, put up fuel duty by 2p a litre and directly subsidise.
You're vibrating the road anyway, so the argument would be to replace the road with something that can use that to create energy.Originally Posted by kalniel
I don't think the loss would be to the car, but in the process of actually producing and installing such a system.
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Wouldn't it be better to design roads that didn't vibrate as much then? Allow more of the energy to stay in the tyre. Surely cheaper than piezoelectrics. (Actually I think there are people looking into it - the surface is also much quieter if it doesn't vibrate.)
Isn't that slightly flawed logic there since compression of a road is in the vertical axis whilst car movement is on a horizontal axis.
Since they are perpendicular of each other they are also independant of each other since neither has a component force/velocity in the other's direction.
As such what you're taking away is energy out of a car's movement down into the road and not from their velocity.
?
No. Energy is energy.
If the energy used to compress these generators isn't coming from the petrol in a car's tank, then where is it coming from?
Umm, science aside, could you really see the numpties in the traffic dept keeping that sort of road in working order? They can barely look after the shambles we have at the moment..
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Simple. Gravity. If I remember my GCSE physics right, piezoelectric crystals generate a voltage when they are compressed - nothing to do with vibrations/movement. As the car runs over the crystals, they are compressed by the weight of the car, and thus have minimal if any impact on the car's fuel consumption.
i'm pretty sure the picture they've used there is from the M6 near where i live
and anyway, who needs this energy when they showed us that new Honda FCX Clarity last night on Top Gear, surely that's the future?
So actually we don't need to drive over them -we can just park a car on them, leave it there, and bingo - free POWER!!
Or perhaps compression is caused by a potential energy difference, therefore you need to remove the weight to be able to compress again, and guess what? It takes energy to remove that weight, otherwise known as fuel being burned as you drive the car off the crystal again...
People have been talking about fuel cells for years and years - they still have the same problems they had back then - the electricity required to produce hydrogen (from water) is pretty huge, and storing the hydrogen isn't exactly easy either. The making a car that runs on a fuel cell bit is relatively trivial.
EDit: but yes - that kind of thing is the future - plants have been doing something along similar lines for millions of years, it's about time we learned a lesson or two from their success.
Last edited by kalniel; 16-12-2008 at 09:44 AM.
I would have thought that yes, you need to remove the weight to compress it again to generate more energy. However, since the issue here is putting them on motorways, there would be a continual transfer of weight on and off the crystals, without burning fuel unnecessarily.
No parking your car on crystals in your garage and powering your house!
Think it through - in your arguement if movement downwards is powering the thing, then you've got to move the car up to get off the thing (or to get on it in the first place). That's an upwards movement which you didn't have before. Now, which uses more fuel - travelling flat, or travelling upwards?
True. Except that solids compress an insignificant amount; even liquids barely compress. So yes, I spose there might be a tiny amount of uphill-ness but still, I don't think it'll be noticeable in fuel consumption terms.
Nope, no difference at all..
Road surface A - Without microcrystals
Road surface B - With microcrystals
Who says they have to be at different heights?
Road surfaces are usually laid by ripping away the old surface down to a depth and laying the new one down, same thing happens here.
Even if there is a slight difference in levels, there will be more differences on normal road surfaces regardless due to repairs, pot-holes, etc etc.
If you look at it logically, it's obvious there would be no difference to a normal road, in fact there is more likely to be differences in existing road surfaces along a given stretch of road which would affect consumption than any new surface.. (certain concrete parts of the A12 for example.)
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