By taking advantage of the vagaries of the natural world, Duke University engineers have developed a novel approach that they believe can more efficiently harvest electricity from the motions of everyday life.

Energy harvesting is the process of converting one form of energy, such as motion, into another form of energy, in this case electricity. Strategies range from the development of massive wind farms to produce large amounts of electricity to using the vibrations of walking to power small electronic devices.

Although motion is an abundant source of energy, only limited success has been achieved because the devices used only perform well over a narrow band of frequencies. These so-called “linear” devices can work well, for example, if the character of the motion is fairly constant, such as the cadence of a person walking. However, as researchers point out, the pace of someone walking, as with all environmental sources, changes over time and can vary widely.

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Tags: electricity, environmental sources, harvesting energy, life energy, motions, novel approach, vibrations, wind farms

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 15th, 2009 at 10:40 am and is filed under Innovation, Project Energy, Science Digest / Science Daily. 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.