Cooking With Sound: Bio-Mass Burning Stove Also Converts Heat Into Sound Then Electricity

A low-cost generator with the potential to transform lives in the world’s poorest communities is now being tested across the UK and in Nepal. The Score project, led by The University of Nottingham, is developing a bio-mass burning cooking stove which also converts heat into acoustic energy and then into electricity, all in one unit.

The £2 million Score project (Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity) brings together experts from across the world to develop the biomass-powered generator. By developing an affordable, versatile domestic appliance Score aims to address the energy needs of rural communities in Africa and Asia, where access to power is extremely limited.

Researchers in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at The University of Nottingham are working on the generator’s Linear Alternator — the part which turns the sound energy into electricity. The system uses special configurations of magnets which generate electrical energy from sound. Computer simulations of the linear alternator have proved successful, and test models are currently being constructed in the department’s workshops.

Nottingham researchers are working with Dai-ichi, one of Malaysia’s largest loudspeaker manufacturers, to bring down production costs through good design practice. Though the Score unit does not physically resemble the average loudspeaker, it is compatible with the Dai-ichi manufacturing process.

Score has been invited by Dai-ichi to exhibit at the “Better City Better Life” EXPO 2010 in Shanghai China from May to October 2010 to showcase its new advanced technology to 70 million expected visitors.

The aim of the Score project is to make a low-cost, high efficiency generator that can be used in the world’s poorest countries. The generator has a cost target of £20 per household, based on the production of a million units. The generator will weigh between 10 and 20kg. The target is to generate an hour’s use per kilogram of fuel — which could be wood, dung or any other locally-available biomass material.

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Tags: acoustic energy, bio mass, cooking stove, electrical energy, expo 2010, high efficiency, Innovation, poorest countries, score project, sound energy

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 26th, 2009 at 10:06 am and is filed under Economist, Innovation, Project Energy, Science Digest / Science Daily, TechCrunch, environment. 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.