New Shock Absorber Harvests Energy From Bumps In The Road, Increases Fuel Economy

A team of MIT undergraduate students has invented a shock absorber that harnesses energy from small bumps in the road, generating electricity while it smoothes the ride more effectively than conventional shocks. The students hope to initially find customers among companies that operate large fleets of heavy vehicles. They have already drawn interest from the U.S. military and several truck manufacturers.

Senior Shakeel Avadhany and his teammates say they can produce up to a 10 percent improvement in overall vehicle fuel efficiency by using the regenerative shock absorbers. The company that produces Humvees for the army, and is currently working on development of the next-generation version of the all-purpose vehicle, is interested enough to have loaned them a vehicle for testing purposes.

The project came about because “we wanted to figure out where energy is being wasted in a vehicle,” senior Zack Anderson explains. Some hybrid cars already do a good job of recovering the energy from braking, so the team looked elsewhere, and quickly homed in on the suspension.

They began by renting a variety of different car models, outfitting the suspension with sensors to determine the energy potential, and driving around with a laptop computer recording the sensor data. Their tests showed “a significant amount of energy” was being wasted in conventional suspension systems, Anderson says, “especially for heavy vehicles.”

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• MIT Students Invent Energy-Harvesting Shock Absorber, Plan to Take Over the World (treehugger.com)
• Regenerative shock absorbers developed by team at MIT (engadget.com)
• Shocks turn a jolt into a volt (reviews.cnet.com)
• On the Rebound: Scientists invent regenerative shocks (autoblog.com)

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Tags: fuel economy, generating electricity, harvests, hybrid cars, Innovation, shock absorber, suspension systems, vehicle fuel efficiency

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Innovation, Project Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.