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Polls Project14 | What Type of Energy Harvesting Do You Find Most Interesting?
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  • Author Author: tariq.ahmad
  • Date Created: 23 Aug 2019 8:12 PM Date Created
  • Last Updated Last Updated: 24 Aug 2019 11:47 PM
  • Views 3453 views
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  • Comments 12 comments
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Project14 | What Type of Energy Harvesting Do You Find Most Interesting?

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Energy Harvesting

Enter Your Project for a chance to win an Energy Harvesting Grand Prize for Inspiring the World to Reuse Wasted Energy!

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Monthly Themes
Monthly Theme Poll

 

Energy Harvesting involves capturing a small amount of "wasted energy" from naturally-occurring energy sources, accumulating them, and storing it in something like an associated energy source such as rechargeable batteries, super capacitors, or ceramic capacitors.  In the theme doc for this month's competition, Project14 | Energy Harvesting: Build Projects that Scavenge Energy from Wasted Energy Sources! ,  some energy harvesting techniques we were mentioned in both the doc and the discussion that followed.  In order to excite your interest in doing projects around energy harvesting we decided to set up a poll on various types or energy harvesting techniques to see what you find the most interesting.

 

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Energy harvesting, sometimes called energy scavenging, involves capturing small amounts of energy that would otherwise be lost. The idea for this competition is to build projects that involve capturing energy from ambient sources (such solar, wind, vibration, heat, motion, sound) and storing it in an associated storage such as rechargeable batteries, super capacitors, ceramic capacitors, and polymer capacitors.  Because this is a very promising eco-friendly technology, that is yet to meet its potential, we've added an Energy Development Platform Kit as the Grand Prize for the project that inspires the world (the most) to reuse wasted energy!  The kit includes four linear voltage converters that are optimized for different energy sources such as solar, electromagnetic, piezo electric, or thermal energy converters. There's also the usual $100 shopping cart for the 3 first winners.  Energy harvesting can be used as an alternative or a supplement to batteries for low-power, lower voltage applications such as a wireless sensor node, where it may be used as a secondary energy source to recharge a battery. It is well suited for applications that require back-up battery, especially in remote or locations that are difficult to reach.  The energy that is typically captured is small so its ideal for any low voltage, low-power project such as a wearable or portable device. The goal of energy harvesting developers is to create self-sustaining and/or improve the efficiency of non-sustainable systems.

Your Prizes

 

One Grand Prize Winner Wins an Energy Harvesting to Go KitThree First Place Winners Win a $100 Shopping Cart
  • One Grand Prize Winner Wins an Energy Harvesting to Go Kit!
  • 3 First Place Winners Win a $100 Shopping Cart!
imageimage
Buy NowBuy Now
IC-744885IC-744885 is a development platform for Energy Harvesting Solution To Go which provides very easy access to energy harvesting technologies. The transfer of this solution to the development of a batteryless product is made easy by the right selection of components, schematics and software examples. The two basic parts of the kits are an energy harvesting board and the Giant Gecko starter kit. There are four linear voltage converters on the multi source energy harvesting board. They are optimized for different energy sources like for solar, electromagnetic, piezo electric or thermal energy converters. The energy harvesting board provides an integrated solar cell and a thermo generator for immediate evaluation.
  • EFM32 Giant Gecko starter kit provides evaluation of energy friendly EFM32 Gecko family MCU
  • On board EFM32GG990F1024 with ARM Cortex M3
  • Debugging with a SEGGER J-Link debugger
  • Energy debugging with an integrated Advanced Energy Monitoring (AEM) with voltage monitoring
  • 4 harvesters for different source types
  • On board solar cell and thermo electric generator  
  • Connectors for optional external generators

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Top Comments

  • Workshopshed
    Workshopshed over 6 years ago +7
    I am working on a project where a Dodo runs away from a glowing volcano. The idea is that the customer winds a handle that will make the legs move but also run a small DC motor in reverse. I don't think…
  • Workshopshed
    Workshopshed over 6 years ago +6
    I recently saw an article on a big electric truck that charges up running down hill with a big load and then uses that to get the empty truck back up the hill. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/08/20/this…
  • jomoenginer
    jomoenginer over 6 years ago +5
    I recently met someone working on a large Kinetic Energy device for Siemens which produces energy from wave movement. This sound very interesting and could be an option for coastal locals or for areas…
  • BigG
    BigG over 5 years ago in reply to dubbie

    I agree. There are so many energy harvesting possibilities from vibration. Here is one company which has put railway vibration to good use: https://perpetuum.com/technology/

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  • dubbie
    dubbie over 5 years ago

    I voted for vibration energy harvesting as it is something I have thought about in the past. A great deal of modern society creates vibrations in the solid infrastructure such as walls, that surround us and it was while waiting to pay for my coffee with my hands on the counter, feeling the vibrations from all the various bit of kitchen machinery, that I considered on a number of occasions that this was wasted energy. I never did anything about it because from an engineering perspective, this is energy wasted from the originating machinery that shouldn't be there anyway, so it would be better to stop the vibration happening rather than trying to gather energy from it. But there is other vibration energy such as from near waterfalls but then more energy could be collected with a simple water turbine. Road vibration is one area where vibration energy might be usefully collected, as well as possible footfall vibration energy from pedestrians.

     

    Dubbie

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  • Workshopshed
    Workshopshed over 6 years ago in reply to clem57

    There are the obvious mechanical ways of getting power from a stream but I was wondering if you could use some static charge method?

     

    https://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/how-to-produce-static-electricity-with-water.html

     

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv4MjaF_wow

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  • clem57
    clem57 over 6 years ago

    I see some really good ideas popping up here.image I am looking at a stream to capture the flow and produce some energy.

    Clem

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  • Instructorman
    Instructorman over 6 years ago in reply to Workshopshed

    Indeed.  There must be a cheap and compact way to capture some of that energy.

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  • Workshopshed
    Workshopshed over 6 years ago in reply to Instructorman

    I suspect the movement of the door would be the biggest energy there. Particularly if you had a spring return on it.

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  • Instructorman
    Instructorman over 6 years ago

    I would like to explore ways of converting and capturing the kinetic energy of turning a door knob and opening/closing a door.  I'm wondering if enough of that energy could be stored to run an electronic door lock.

    I have ideas that I would like to validate.

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  • Workshopshed
    Workshopshed over 6 years ago in reply to dougw

    And for extreme heat systems, I believe salt is used

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  • dougw
    dougw over 6 years ago

    I'm interested in all kinds of energy harvesting and all the weird applications that use them. Although the traditional mainstream methods dominate the applications, the esoteric methods are just as interesting. For example solar sails.

    I don't know if it deserves its own category, but latent heat can be a source of energy, a method of storing energy or a method of improving efficiency. Phase change materials such as water, CO2, wax and various refrigerants are currently used in lots of applications.

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  • Workshopshed
    Workshopshed over 6 years ago

    I am working on a project where a Dodo runs away from a glowing volcano. The idea is that the customer winds a handle that will make the legs move but also run a small DC motor in reverse. I don't think I'll need a sophisticated circuit to capture the energy, just a diode and capacitor.

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