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Powertread turns gridlock into electricity with a series of tubes
Getting stuck in traffic sucks, but thanks to a couple of Kiwis you might soon be feeling a little better about yourself while muttering about the brake-happy commuter ahead of you. An invention called Powertread by Justin Robertson and Brett Kemp looks to do something positive with the unending shuffling of queued cars. It's literally a series of tubes filled with water that, when run over, force their contents through a turbine to generate electricity. One car driving over one of the things generates 580 watts of electricity at 36 amps. That's not an awful lot power, but imagine a dozen of the things lined up at a busy off-ramp, run over by thousands of impatient drivers every day, and you can see the potential. The Singaporean government does too, providing grants to fund the project and two shopping malls there have already signed up to purchase the results. Who knows whether the things will follow our favorite folk duo over to North American shores, but until then you can at least get a similar feel at your local Burger King.
VIVACE generates big power from small currents
These days people are looking everywhere to find new, cheap, and plentiful sources of electricity, and while you wouldn't call it new, the ocean is certainly cheap and plentiful. Plentiful too are the people attempting to convert its motion into power by tapping its waves or extracting its heat. But what about lesser waters moving at a leisurely 3 knots? Those lazy flows make up the majority of all currents and are exactly the target of VIVACE, a series of tubes (seriously) that relies on vortex induced vibrations (the VIV) to create clean aquatic energy (the, uh, ACE). The idea is that the cylindrical shapes create turbulence in slow-moving water, oscillating up and down in electricity-generating ways. It's all the brainchild of Michael Bernitsas, a professor at the University of Michigan, and is partly funded by the US Department of Energy -- your tax dollars at work, you eco-pioneer you.[Via inhabitat]
