Gravity Battery
Batteries are an essential part of almost every portable electronic device. Unfortunately, battery technology has not kept pace with other areas of technological innovation. While devices are often tweaked to be more and more efficient with their power consumption, little emphasis seems to be placed on actually creating an innovative and more effective portable power source.
Now what’s interesting to me is that there are a number of power sources readily available to any given portable device. The challenge is to find ways of usefully harnessing this energy. Obviously such a task is not simple to do, but consider how much energy is generated by simple external forces such as gravity, sunlight, wind, motion, air pressure, etc. Surely it is possible to convert these forces into electricity.
My vote is to use the force of gravity as the power source for a micro-generator which could keep a traditional chemical battery charged enough so that I would never have to plug-in my laptop again!
July 18th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Clocks used a gravity battery — you charged it up once or twice a day by raising some weights that hang from chains, and as time passed, the weight pulling on the chains provided the energy that drove the clockwork. When the weights reached the ends of their chains [or the floor], your gravity battery was discharged. You recharged it by pulling the chain through the device to bring the weight up near the top of the chain again.
July 18th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
If you live near a tappable source of constant kinetic energy — say, a waterfall — you can harness a water wheel to charge your generator[s].
Where is some energy left untapped that we could tap without draining the source?
Outside my office, cars travel back & forth almost constantly. Couldn’t the electricity that powers the streetlights be generated by the weight of the cars, or their motion through a magnetic field? Seems a shame to waste all that motive power.
Every staircase absorbs energy — can we tap and store that?