I Like this Idea: Electricity from gravity. DUH why didn't I think of this !

badgerprints
Most vehicles use brakes going downhill.
Just a fact.

So, you never just let up some on the throttle? Your cruise control does. Unless I'm going down the side of Lookout Mountain or something, it's all I do to maintain a constant speed.

Bedlam

badgerprints
Most vehicles use brakes going downhill.
Just a fact.

So, you never just let up some on the throttle? Your cruise control does. Unless I'm going down the side of Lookout Mountain or something, it's all I do to maintain a constant speed.

OK.
You win.
Gravity works at your whim and no one ever uses brakes on a downhill grade.
Inform the mods and have the thread shut down.
All hail the king of gravity.
May Issac Newton bless your genius forever.

Why are you all still trying to discover free energy when the answer lies in free money. You fools.

Stop wasting time on working out how to put wasted energy to good use, that form of free energy will never cut it, you dig? crazy cats with they r hippy fisasco shenanigans. Quit it, get a job.

But if you could work out the solution to how one could power their computer while mining cryptocurrencies, FOR FREE.. cut out the electricity bill. Maximise profits. Put all this good power to use. why you'd be saving the very best of humanity. The ones that actually do all the hard yards.

Us poor plebs that have all the brilliant ideas but none of the brains to work it out. We know there is a way, god damn it!!!!

enough pondering.

Get to work you ingrates. My PC is overheating.

reply to post by Bedlam


I think I understand your point, is that it would be difficult to extract energy if the ground is so solid. How does a scale work, the mass of an object is energy, for gravity gives it enough energy to move a solid mass downward, this is weight. A street with a moving car on it, is there not more weight on the street where the car is (or immediately near it) then where the car is not? If the street was made of a material that could absorb the weight the car exhibits on the street, that is what the OP is about. I believe your point is that, streets are the material streets are made of in order to have the least amount of give or absorption, because that is what allows cars to move most freely, you are saying that material would have to have some amount of give, in order to receive the weight of the car, and this give would slow down the cars forward progress thus robbing it of its own energy via its internal mechanism of propulsion. The above example using a scale, imagine those older scales, non digi, where there is a platter that moves down a lot when heavier objects are placed. But compared to a digi scale, the weight of an object can be determined with little surface movement, could a similar technology be used to convert that weight or pressure, into storageable energy?

Astyanax
reply to post by NoRulesAllowed

 

There is a very, very SIMPLE rule in physics:

*** Energy cannot be created, it can only be transformed ***

This alone is enough to disregard the entire idea, as "nicely" it may be described in the post.

Simple it is, but it doesn't apply here.

This isn't free energy; it's an attempt to be more energy-efficient, to get more useful work out of an internal combustion engine without having it burn any more fuel. It may turn out to be impracticable, but it is not absurd on the face of it.

How is that "more energy efficient"? (I mean I am aware a thing like "free energy" obviously doesn't exist.)

Since energy is "tapped" on one end, according to physics the energy MUST come from somewhere. Agree?
So what this is is merely a shifting from who provides/pays this energy....but it's not "more efficient".

You cannot get "more useful work" out of a device or machine for "nothing"...OF COURSE it will burn more fuel, in the same way as your car's AC will burn more fuel when you turn it on. The principle is the same, ultimately it's the car's gas which is producing this energy.

It's also obviously having nothing to do with gravity since for a supposed "gravity device" the car wouldn't even need to run, you would just sit a weight somewhere and then harvest energy endlessly from the gravity pushing the car down. Needless to say this doesn't work.

reply to post by Bedlam

You never get over that lip.

The lip has been eliminated. I can't waste time drawing diagrams, so visualise this: a level roadway with a downstep in it of two cm or so. The pressure plate for the bellows is placed directly after the step, contiguous with it, in the path of a descending vehicle. When a car rolls over it the pressure plate depresses, compressing the air inside the bellows, transferring some of the car's gravitational PE while softening its 2-cm fall because of hydraulic resistance from the air inside the bellows. The car then rolls off the pressure plate, which is now at the lower level of the roadway, without any loss of KE.

Well, sort of. Most people don't maintain a rigidly fixed speed going up and down hills. It's MOST fuel efficient if you let the car accelerate going downhill and use that kinetic energy to help you go up the next.

In most places, there is a legal speed limit the motorist cannot exceed. There may be pedestrians and other traffic in the way, or a corner you have to slow down for. As somebody else pointed out, you normally have to use your brakes at some point when driving downhill. I live on top of the highest hill my district, and I assure you I have to use my brakes quite frequently when driving down it every day.

You end up with an uneven speed.

You end up with that all the time. Don't you drive?

In this case, you're tapping off the energy the engine umped into the car to get it to the top of the hill. That's not wasted if you let the car speed up on the downside.

That's not how it works, as anyone who has been behind the wheel in real life can attest.

I respect your knowledge and usually agree with you on ATS, but now you're just defending the indefensible. Give me a better reason for scoffing at this than the one you have presented. It holds no water.

How about electricity from carbon dioxide?

Astyanax
The lip has been eliminated.

I don't think so, the moment the tire drops 2cm, the engine would have to push a little harder to get out of that hole.

I would have have a little more faith in the idea if it was piezo based and the idea was to collect the energy from the moving and shaking that cars experience during the trip from point A to point or while idle.

A better idea might be to place thermopiles around the hot areas of a car and have that energy transferred to a collection grid in the asphalt. This way the vehicle would not have to lug around heavy batteries to store this energy but some of that energy wasted by the ICE, more than half of what is in the fuel, could be recovered. It would also be simpler than a bunch of bellows.

Astyanax
The lip has been eliminated.

Not if you're using it on a flat. So let's break it down.

I can't waste time drawing diagrams, so visualise this: a level roadway with a downstep in it of two cm or so. The pressure plate for the bellows is placed directly after the step, contiguous with it, in the path of a descending vehicle. When a car rolls over it the pressure plate depresses, compressing the air inside the bellows, transferring some of the car's gravitational PE while softening its 2-cm fall because of hydraulic resistance from the air inside the bellows. The car then rolls off the pressure plate, which is now at the lower level of the roadway, without any loss of KE.

From your description, I assume you are considering the downside of a hill, and not what happens on a flat with an endless string of these pressure plate devices. Ok, let's start there.

My previous claim is that using one on the downside of a hill will absorb the energy the car's engine pumped into the vehicle and getting it up the hill. So you lose mgh worth of energy on the descending side of the hill. You say you don't lose any kinetic energy. That's true descending a hill, but not on a flat - but you DO lose the gravitational potential energy, which is what I said you would lose.

Assume you have a series of these 5cm steps that cover the entire descending side of the hill. Each time you roll onto a new pressure plate, the plate drops 5cm to the new lower level. The car does indeed continue without losing kinetic energy (other than to the obvious parasitic losses). This continues 5cm at a whack until you're at the bottom. Yay! But does the car speed up due to rolling down the hill? No. You've dropped the thing 5cm at a time vertically. There was no vector accelerating the car forward because you dropped vertically - there's no vector projection in the forward direction. You might as well have rolled onto a single plate that dropped the entire distance before you rolled off the other end, breaking it into little pieces just obfuscates the problem.

Since the car doesn't accelerate due to the descending slope, you get diddly back from going back down the hill, and as I said, the energy the engine pumped into the car getting you up the hill is lost to the collection mechanism. So instead of coming off the end going faster or being able to take your foot off the throttle on the way down and thus saving fuel either way, you will have to keep your foot on the throttle the whole time for no gain.

If you put a series on them on the flat, you ARE continually rolling up the lip onto the next pressure plate, which is what I was talking about when I said that. Going down a hill hides this because it's taking the energy from the gravitational potential energy in the car and not the kinetic energy. On the flat, it's getting it from the kinetic energy of the car.

This would be a decent test question in first semester physics but it's fairly straightforward.

In most places, there is a legal speed limit the motorist cannot exceed. There may be pedestrians and other traffic in the way, or a corner you have to slow down for. As somebody else pointed out, you normally have to use your brakes at some point when driving downhill. I live on top of the highest hill my district, and I assure you I have to use my brakes quite frequently when driving down it every day.

Great! Around here, I have to tap the brakes a few times going past Tehachapi on the way between Bakersfield and the customer site, or between Bakersfield and LA. But usually I don't need to around town. At any rate, it's not a big deal. If you had a hybrid, you'd be stealing the power from the battery recharging. If you weren't on the highest hill in the district, you would be stealing the MPG of your car by not being able to take your foot off the throttle as you went down the hill. I assume you drive an automatic? I don't. I can just downshift, but I digress.

You end up with that all the time. Don't you drive?

That's not how it works, as anyone who has been behind the wheel in real life can attest.

In one case, you insult me because I say it will vary and you think this is common knowledge. In the next, you insult me because you think it should NOT vary. I think you're grasping at something to complain about. Yes, I've been driving for about 32 years.

I respect your knowledge and usually agree with you on ATS, but now you're just defending the indefensible. Give me a better reason for scoffing at this than the one you have presented. It holds no water.

You only think it holds no water because you haven't done a painful number of Newtonian physics problems in university both as a student and as a grad student/teacher/lab assistant. You failed to see the rather obvious mechanism by which you lose the gravitational potential energy of the car on the down side of the hill. And, exactly as I stated, if you put it on the descending side of a hill, you lose the energy the engine has pumped into the car getting it up the hill.

On the flat, a string of these subtracts from the kinetic energy, because you're continually rolling up the lip, as I also said. You can't cross-quote the two scenarios and say I am "defending the indefensible", this is the sort of problem a C student in first year college physics could be reliably counted on to solve in less than 15 minutes, quantitatively.

badgerprints
All hail the king of gravity.

I take it you were a humanities major? If you had a good general physics overview in uni or definitely if you had Physics I with calculus you'd have covered crap sliding down slopes with and without wheels ad nauseam.

Seems to me a better way to implement this idea would be some kind of piezo crystal pressure plate arrangement to get rid of the hoses, bellows, generators, and all the other mechanical muckie muck.

One of the students at my daughters science fair last year worked on a piezo crystal system under the keys of the computer keyboard that put energy back into the batteries, a sort of "regenerative typing" system. Not enough to eliminate recharges, but certainly enough to prolong battery life to some degree.

ImaFungi
reply to post by Bedlam

 

I think I understand your point, is that it would be difficult to extract energy if the ground is so solid. How does a scale work, the mass of an object is energy, for gravity gives it enough energy to move a solid mass downward, this is weight.

The mass of an object ISN'T energy. It's mass. Gravity applies a force to mass, THAT is weight. Energy is mass, times little g, times the height the mass moves through, with positive being downward.

A street with a moving car on it, is there not more weight on the street where the car is (or immediately near it) then where the car is not? If the street was made of a material that could absorb the weight the car exhibits on the street, that is what the OP is about.

I understand what the OP is about. Look. Just weight on a surface is not energy. "absorbing weight" doesn't make any sense as a phrase in physics. If it doesn't drop, then no energy can be collected. You can't have a perfectly rigid surface, put a weight on it, and get any energy, because energy of that sort is mgh. With an h of zero (rigid) then you get no energy.

The only thing that will net you energy is to put the weight on, have the surface give or drop, and collect the energy provided by the mass moving through the drop in a gravitic field. No give, no energy.

I believe your point is that, streets are the material streets are made of in order to have the least amount of give or absorption, because that is what allows cars to move most freely, you are saying that material would have to have some amount of give, in order to receive the weight of the car, and this give would slow down the cars forward progress thus robbing it of its own energy via its internal mechanism of propulsion.

Basically, although I would not use some of those terms that way. But essentially, yes.

The above example using a scale, imagine those older scales, non digi, where there is a platter that moves down a lot when heavier objects are placed. But compared to a digi scale, the weight of an object can be determined with little surface movement, could a similar technology be used to convert that weight or pressure, into storageable energy?

On old scales, you are deforming a spring to determine the weight. In digital ones, you're using a strain gauge. They don't have to move much. But it's not an energy source.

It all comes back to mgh. That's what energy there is. No h, no energy. You have to have a mass moving through a distance in a gravitational field. There's not any technology where you get energy from something sitting on a rigid surface, because h is going to be zero.

tjack
Seems to me a better way to implement this idea would be some kind of piezo crystal pressure plate arrangement to get rid of the hoses, bellows, generators, and all the other mechanical muckie muck.

One of the students at my daughters science fair last year worked on a piezo crystal system under the keys of the computer keyboard that put energy back into the batteries, a sort of "regenerative typing" system. Not enough to eliminate recharges, but certainly enough to prolong battery life to some degree.

Well, it would likely be more efficient. But even with piezos, the energy recovered is proportional to the amount of the flex. If you don't have a drop, you're not going to get any power.

reply to post by Bedlam


Right, and I would argue that the asphalt surface of the road top is relatively flexible in the grand scheme of things, and is all ready "flexing" enough to allow some collection of otherwise wasted energy.

How much?

That I won't pretend to know. Maybe at the end of the day it's only enough to recharge a few cell phones and not nearly worth the trouble, but we know for sure that there's some amount of energy available "where the rubber meets the road", at least if feeling how hot a tire gets is any indication.

Hey, let's put a piezo system "inside" the tires and invent "regenerative rolling"! Million dollar idea right there!

reply to post by tjack


There's a really wonderful source of high-grade energy that's being thrown away in the car, and that's engine heat. Hell, cars go to a lot of trouble to radiate it away. If you could pump that into the battery of a hybrid, you'd cover some real ground.

tjack
reply to post by Bedlam

 

How much?

The mass times little g times the amount the road gives. That's how much.

I came up with this idea about 15years ago and sent it into one of these companies that invest in new ideas and inventions. They used to have an advert on the TV saying if you had any good ideas to send it to them and if they liked it they would get it to market.

They totally rejected the idea, its a shame i didn't try to pursue it any further

Its says in the article there is a UK patent covering the idea, i would really like to know who owns the patent and when it was registered as i live in the UK and im slightly suspicious now.

Bedlam

badgerprints
All hail the king of gravity.

I take it you were a humanities major? If you had a good general physics overview in uni or definitely if you had Physics I with calculus you'd have covered crap sliding down slopes with and without wheels ad nauseam.

Once again.
Another person who lives in a world where there is no such thing as a car that uses brakes on a downhill grade.
All or nothing here on this site I guess.

reply to post by tjack


I think you can model the road surface as a spring-damper system at tire contact. And ideally you would want to replace the damping component by the harvesting mechanism (to some degree).

But that roads would be rather expensive, not as simple as adding some piezoceramics to the asphalt mixture I guess.

Doable? Maybe. Cost effective? I don't think so.

XL5
The problem is, it takes some power/fuel to compress this air. Too little power sapped from a car and the device cost outweighs the benefit. On a sidwalk too much power being sapped from the feet will make it feel like walking in sand and people will avoid it.

It would be better to have rollers connected to a generator at stop lights and have people not holding the break down. Idling wastes fuel if you are not moving.

Its not really free energy though.

That's why modern car have stop start tech built in!