Prototype piezoelectric road could generate power by simply sitting there
By Darren Murph 
posted December 13th 2008 1:20PM
posted December 13th 2008 1:20PM
By sitting there and getting ran over by motorcars, that is. In an effort to best other power-generating highway options that involve solar panels and enlarged blender arms, Britain's Environmental Transport Association is looking to test a prototype highway that's embedded with piezoelectric crystals. Essentially, the process would work much like the power-generating Tokyo station floors we saw earlier this week; each car that squishes a crystal would contribute a tiny bit of energy, and the collective effect could be enormous. In fact, it's estimated that a single kilometer of roadway could generate 400-kilowatts of energy, or enough to power around eight small cars. And we're no rocket scientists (nor physicists), but we're assuming these whiz kids already made sure these magic crystals weren't friction-generating, too. Right?
Sounds like creating a "perpetual motion machine" to me (since the cars generate the same energy they'll use) -and since we all know that wouldn't work, at least that'd make the whole transportation process much more energy efficient. Why not inventing solar floors? or solar paints for that matter?, that way it'd be much easier to have just about anything generating electrical power =).
Careful there. Using sunlight to generate electricity means that sunlight will generate less heat. Of course, all the electricity will eventually be converted back to heat, but depending on the nature of the work it's used to do, the release of that energy could be delayed for years. Converting too much sunlight in an area into electricity could lower the average temperature enough to have a significant effect on that area's weather patterns, especially if the electricity is consumed outside of the area.
Why is this becoming the new rage I have seen three or four stories on piezo's lately not a new technology and not a good source of energy. They have been used forever to determine pressure differences in scales and such because depending on the pressure changes the small and I mean Tiny amount of voltage that they produce these are not useful for generating electricity anymore than hooking up a generator to every hamster wheel sold from now on. (Wait can I claim that idea it might just sell these days)
1 piezo = little voltage
Lots of piezo = big(ger) voltage
Piezotastic
Would it be petroleum powered, or gravity powered? Gravity is what would be acting on the car to compress the road/p-electric crystals, right?
Use it to power street lights and such.
Well you can't power anything from gravity, you have to raise something away from the source of gravity then let it fall to get energy, it is impossible to get back more energy from harnessing the energy from the fall than the amount you put into raising it. If the car was not moving the road would not generate any energy.
Now the reason I don't say this idea is completely stupid is that I know that just about all road surfaces compress when cars travel over it. If the compression of this road surface is IDENTICAL or less than that of what would normally be used then I think it is a great idea because cars would use no more energy than normal to travel the road, and the energy that would normally go into generating heat and sound/seismic waves would be converted into electricity.
And if they do compress more but generate lots of electricity while it may not be very efficient sale of the electricity could help pay for the road, IE driving on the road and using more fuel/energy to do it you are sort of paying a toll, then no one has to run toll booths.
Also if it has more compression than a normal road then it could be quieter.
-Edward from http://blog.freesoftwareforkaren.com
Well, sure you can power things with gravity :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_wheel
But you are right, without the forward motion, then it's rather pointless.
I guess I was just thinking- the forward motion of the car isn't in the same direction as the compression.
CTMike: That's not energy coming from Gravity. It was the potential energy the water "had" in having been raised upward against Gravity. Gravity is just a force, not a source of energy.
Finally! An excuse for speeding!
"Honestly, officer! I was just trying to do my part to generate more electricity!"
I wonder how much power they could generate by sticking these in the home of the average morbidly obese person?
Very little considering the morbidly obese are fat lazy fuckers who would rather shit themselves than go to the nearest toilet.
Being morbidly obese is pretty average here.
O.
A cheaper, more efficient, more environmentally friendly, more honest option:
Just tax the people who drive on the roads. They save on petrol, and you buy electricity from more efficient, even renewable sources.
In America, that already happens through vehicle Taxes, yearly tag registration, and fuel taxes.
The amounts are used for transportation administration use for road funding.
Dan, we incur pretty small fees to drive on highways (or just to drive in general) compared with the rest of the world.
How comes that nobody ever thought of harnessing the precious energy and the valuable combustible natural gases that get wasted everyday by over 6 billion people farting loose in the atmosphere (which moreover contributes to greenhouse effect) ???
Just a little accumulator stored in your panties could charge your cell phone/pda at the end of a day, and all the little accumulators of the nation could power a medium sized city for a month.
Let's be frank here, you are an idiot.
@ Samboini: idiots is what Einstein, Touring, Kantor and Tezla where called by pathetic moron that like you lacked the mental openeness and the intelligence to realize that thing could be different if approached in a different way.
Let's be frank Samboini: You're a pathetic & useless turd.
Well when you prove me wrong I will rescind my comment, until then stop coming out with comments so idiotic even iEye would cringe. There is a difference between open, alternative thinking and sheer idiocy.
I also LOL at you (albeit tentatively) comparing yourself to Einstein et al. If it is any consolation this 'pathetic moron' has just helped save his client ~£1m/month in money via taking an alternative approach to their fee structure.
"Touring, Kantor and Tezla", "alternative approach to their fee structure". Face it, you, and all the other engadget commenters are all nerds.
End nerd on nerd violence!
My, what a big epeen you have, Samboini.
Um. People have known about piezoelectrics for ages. It's how we came to develop electronics of all kinds. These ideas of integrating with streets and places of high density for people to walk over and generate electricity were conceived long before these articles. And by long before, I mean at least 40 years ago. You can't just implement piezoelectrics into any material. The compression forces that apply a stress to the crystral lattice structure change the charge distribution which needs to be connect to some sort of circuit. That's why a tire isn't going to work.
Think about the possibilities! If you can get these efficient enough, and combine this with MIT's wireless electricity charger, you can have cars powered by their own weight!
Yeah, that sounds like just about the most efficient energy transfer ever...
The technology isn't the question IMO, the question is can I electrocute the racoons and squirrels before or after I run over them on this road, and will the piezoroads clean up the roadkill, or simply cook it for 3 hours at 300 degrees untill theres no pink in the middle?
With nanomachines, the road will "carry" it directly to your door when it's done and all the parasites are dead. Kinda like the way those waves in Marble Madness pushed you along, and off the cliff...repeatedly.
I understand people saying it's stealing petroleum powered energy; however this would be a completely different road surface. Let's say the road is able to have the same amount of "squish" of you will, as a standard road. Using that same level of squish that is normally there, we could harness some of the energy that the road was "stealing" anyways. I'd rather have wasted energy go to the grid than go to deteriorating the asphalt.
And as electric cars become more prominent, it's really energy reclamation anyways. This is a good step to be taking in research; why are there so many naysayers?
Is'nt this harnessing energy that would be wasted anyway? It doesn't necessarily have to 'take' an extra energy from the passing cars, just utilise the energy that is normally wasted as vibration and friction. Solar power does'nt cause the sun to burn more fuel, it simply recovers some lost energy as useful power. Think of it as increasing the overall % efficiency of motoring, rather than robbing the motorist, or conversely, 'free energy'.
This is pretty easy to prove or disprove and that has probably already happened. It just that most articles on the subject assume that readers would be bored by those details. If an ordinary road compresses, there will be waste heat that can be measured. If a piezio-road can recover some of that energy then it is not stealing it from the cars.
Robert Abramson is totally correct. TANSTAAFL. Interesting idea for pedestrians, but doing it for roadways is just silly. The energy generated will actually be caused by the increased fuel consumption of the vehicles - meaning its just a way to generate power less efficiently. Cynically, the only reason that I can imagine the government/councils would be keen on it would be so they could then sell the power to line their budgets and it would in effect be yet another fuel tax on the road users - and one that would actually be worse for the environment compared to more efficient generation systems.
I wonder where people like you come from. You have absolutely no proof for your claim and yet you state it as fact.
It would be nice to see details on how this will produce a net gain in energy. It may produce a net gain in useful energy if, for example, the cars' pressure would ordinarily produce a tiny bit of heat that will now be captured as electricity instead.
But this obvious question remains unanswered by the article, so what we have is another journalistic failure.
Ain't no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to Physics.
Conservation of energy means that the car will continuously require more throttle as it will encounter more resistance from the road surface.
Nice try, but you'd be better off building a power station that ran on PETROL.
Wow, I heard about this technology like 2 years ago. Where you could simply walk on it and it would generate electricity. The idea was to replace mall floors and sidewalks (of say time square) with it so that the area could be self sufficient in energy. I agree with the flaws you guys mentioned about using cars to generate the energy
Nobody mentions other problems with piezoelectric crystals. I'm curious to know if they figured out how to prevent them from wearing out. From what I know about crystals used in gas lighters, they stop making electrical spark pretty soon, and don't work at all when system get's moisture in it.
400 Kilowatts of energy per? Hour? Week? Year? Come, now, get it together, boys!
One watt is one joule of energy per second. There is your time unit.
This thread is as bad as those plane-on-a-treadmill threads.
Here's a comment from TFA that explains why this works and doesn't "steal" energy from drivers:
"Piezoelectric crystals generate electricity from vibrations, not compression. This will have no effect on the gas mileage of cars as it will be using the waste energy that already exists as vibrations in the road from tires rolling across it. Normally this energy is wasted as it is absorbed and dissipated into the asphalt. The same amount of enery will be going into the road but now instead of just being wasted and absorbed by the asphalt it will vibrate the piezo crystals and generate electricity. Just as placing a PV panel on the roof of your house will take the normally wasted energy from the sun and trun it into usefull energy."
Well said. Here, have a cookie.
...Why not just put the piezos in the tires!?! That way you're always using them, and you dont have to carpet an entire road, where most of them wont be touched anyway...
Seems like a nice way to reduce your environmental guilt level when driving a gas guzzling vehicle.
apparently, no one read that 400kw of power is generated per kilometer of roadway. Assuming 16 hrs equivalent peak traffic per day @ $.10 per kilowatt-hour, this 1-Km section will generate $640 per day per kilometer, or $233,600 per year. I've read somewhere that a mile of road costs $1 million to build, so 1 kilometer would cost $625,000. So, this device would pay for itself in 3 years, with pure profit afterwards. And those who wrote that this increases friction/energy use for the cars are idiots, it's using WASTED energy.
amen scorpion. I've been reading through these comments and i'm disgusted with how many people think it's "stealing energy". Piezoelectrics require very little "flex," so little that it can be a vibration. This small vibration produces a small voltage spike. It's using wasted energy that would otherwise be absorbed by the asphalt.
Guys
Think bigger.. The cars are already running over the road and friction is variable because of the surface which changes anyway... what if the energy transferred in the road was used to power Led street lights then the saving is in the cable sunder ground, maintenance of them or even power local housing in some way.
The Power supplier chain starts at the Car production plant when the first nut and bolt are creating by power of heating metal.... the power supply chain grows as each component is completed, built together fuelled to run along the street and starts to lose the energy into the road through the power train and the friction (and lots of other areas) this idea is about capturing that lost power in to the road and making use of it.
IT IS NOT ABOUT perpetual energy, just a good idea about redirecting energy.
Steve
Piezo electric,
Free energy of the future? More than you will ever know.
It will replace ALL current forms of power production. Just wait and see!
There is something BIG in the works regarding Piezo electrics. When I say BIG, I really mean HUGE!!!!