Harvesting energy from vehicle air flow using piezoelectrics

Previously, we’ve looked at technology to generate electricity from roads embedded with piezoelectric crystals that produce electricity when squeezed. Now a group of researchers is looking to shift the technology from the road to the vehicles themselves and use piezoelectrics placed on the vehicles to convert their kinetic energy into electricity.

About a half-inch by one inch, these piezoelectric devices might be mounted on the roof or tail of a car or on an airplane fuselage where they would vibrate inside a flow, producing an output voltage. Although the power generated would not be enough to replace that supplied by the combustion engines, it could be enough to run some systems, such as batteries that would be used to charge control panels and other small electronic devices such as mobile phones.

Read more . . .

Related articles by Zemanta

• Piezoelectrics find use in vehicles (ubergizmo.com)
• Promising tests for MotionPower system to generate electricity from traffic (innovationtoronto.com)

Random Posts:

• Google Plans Tools to Help News Media Charge for Content
• A prize for a moon lander will be won this month
• Perspective
• Revolutionary Road
• An Example of Micro Payments as the Wave of the Future: Games

Related posts:

1. Harvesting Energy From Nature’s Motions
2. Researchers show off tiny piezoelectric energy capture sensor
3. EVs to get improved mileage from redox flow batteries
4. Flow Batteries
5. Korean electric vehicle solution

Tags: batteries, harvesting energy, harvesting energy from, piezoelectric, piezoelectric crystals, piezoelectric devices, piezoelectrics

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Innovation, Project Energy, gizmag. 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.