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Himanshu_Gupta
i find such research efforts mundane rather than breakthrough. We know the ...
peter.clarke
Researchers look at typing as power source
Peter Clarke
6/29/2011 9:39 AM EDT
LONDON – Researchers in Australia have been looking at whether typing could be used to recharge electronic equipment. If their findings can be scaled up then chargers could be relegated to emergency use only.
Lead co-author Madhu Bhaskaran from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) said that her work had for the first time precisely measured the electrical voltage and current that could be generated by piezoelectric thin films.
Reportedly the voltage output of up to 40 mV and current transients up to 200 pA, compare to published results for nanowire generators of 30 mV and 100 pA which were shown to be suitable for powering nanosensors.
The original motivation for the work was to see whether the blood pressure and the pulse could used to power implanted devices such as pacemakers.
But Bhaskaran said there is a lot of interest for recharging electronic portable devices, such as cell phones, iPads and iPhones. "Essentially any electronic portable device that uses a battery is something which we will be looking at as a potential application. And currently the power levels that we are able to generate are around ten times less than what is required, so that's the next step; to amplify the power available" she said in a television interview.
Bhaskaran said scaling up the output of thin-film piezoelectrics would take two or three years. After that commercialization should be "fairly quick" because thin-film piezoeletrics are a good fit with modern electronic devices which already use thin films for touch screens. The RMIT results have been published in Volume 21, Issue 12 of the science journal, Advanced Functional Materials.
"Our study focused on thin film coatings because we believe they hold the only practical possibility of integrating piezoelectrics into existing electronic technology," said Bhaskaran.
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Frank Eory
6/29/2011 10:23 AM EDT
Digital design engineers do a tremendous amount of typing and could be a great power source. For analog designers, we would need to find a way to harness the energy in mouse movements :)
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Nic_Mokhoff
6/29/2011 10:35 AM EDT
Great comment, Frank! I suppose that the touch measurement will be time as well as pressure dependent and thus fast-to-the-draw typists will save more energy for their machines. I bet analog engineers might win with on-screen keyboards depending how quickly they can handle the mouse :):)
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Duane Benson
6/29/2011 10:46 AM EDT
A keyboard seems like an odd place to be looking at energy harvesting. The math also doesn't seem to add up to me. if 200pA is 10x too small, what is 2nA enough current to do? The amount of harvestable power seems far more than a single order of magnitude too small.
A better place to look might be in overall body motion; bending elbows and knees, for example.
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Sanjib.Acharya
6/29/2011 12:01 PM EDT
Yeah...I am not able to understand the practical application of the energy harvested using the keyboard. Keyboard of what?...a laptop, or a PC? Where will you use that minute amount of energy? I think a real-time example would be helpful.
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Himanshu_Gupta
6/30/2011 7:38 AM EDT
and yeah this would solve all our energy problems. I mean who would spend extra money and time if one can just plug in the device to the main outlet?
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walken1
6/29/2011 1:43 PM EDT
I agree, Duane. I've wondered why physical fitness clubs like 24-hour, etc., haven't found a way to harvest energy from people using gym equipment during their workouts. With all of the treadmills and ellipticals in use at any one time, you'd think there'd be an opportunity there somewhere.
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LarryM99
6/29/2011 6:48 PM EDT
That would work well for January through maybe about March, but the rest of the year those places don't get enough use to be a reliable source. I'm only about half kidding...
Larry M.
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Code Monkey
6/29/2011 6:02 PM EDT
It would work better with strongly typed languages. But seriously, thin film piezos charging a battery? They would be better suited to wide area sensors like flexible keypads and electronic whiteboards.
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prabhakar_deosthali
6/30/2011 12:04 AM EDT
When keyboards itself have started vanishing from the portable devices such as mobiles and tablets , to do research on energy harvesting using keyboards is itself a waste of energy. There could be better ways of energy harvesting from our body movement such as walking, cycling and so on
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Salio
6/30/2011 12:07 AM EDT
...
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Salio
6/30/2011 12:12 AM EDT
Interesting article. Using typing to charge continuously charge your laptop or wireless device. This would be big break for the smart phone industry. My Sensation battery sucks. If I run 4G on it, it will drain the battery in about 2 or 3 hours. If I can continuously charge the battery as I am using the phone, heck running 4G is not an issue. This would be amazing.
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lifewingmate
6/30/2011 1:20 AM EDT
This is definitely an interesting study. I'm surprised that the study doesn't mention anything about PC laptop and desktop keyboards which probably generate more power and require less power than touch screen keyboards. Also, touch screen keyboards are just pieces of code that appear and not physical keys, so I would love to learn more about the functionality of piezoelectric thin films. Currently, smart phones, for example often have a terribly low battery life. So, I agree with Salio above that this very simple interaction could be a huge breakthrough. It reminds me of self-powered mechanical watches.
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ysp
6/30/2011 2:06 AM EDT
we can harness energy from analog engineers also, i think it can be best done with a track ball mouse based on the movement of the ball we can generate energy and by placing a thin film near the mouse click this can be achived . ...
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eewiz
6/30/2011 2:25 AM EDT
The amount of power generated is too low. At best the idea may be useful for extend battery life of desktop wireless keyboards running on a rechargeable battery.
BTW, If they make it work, then people have to push the keys harder, which consumes more energy from the user, which makes them consume more food to replenish.. back to square one. food to energy. what is conversion efficiency? 5%?
People had the same complaints about Israel's Piezo road and Tokyo's Piezo floors :)
http://www.gizmag.com/piezoelectric-road-harvests-traffic-energy-to-generate-electricity/10568/
http://www.celsias.com/article/foot-powering-tokyo-train-station/
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peter.clarke
6/30/2011 10:54 AM EDT
You make a good point.
The fuel efficiency of an automobile on the piezo-road goes down, because the car is doing more work. That's what happens when you switch the aircon on in the car. In effect it could be a skimming tax that gets all the cars to do a little bit of extra work to reduce the municipality's cost of electricity.
There is a distinction to be made between energy harvesting that would otherwise be wasted and adding to the work load.
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Jeff.Petro
6/30/2011 10:18 AM EDT
I actually been toying with similar ideas for a number of years now. While individually, each device would only generate a minimal amount of energy, collectively they could provide an adequate amount of power.
There are literally thousands of places we could siphon off a little bit of this wasted eney. Walking, riding a bicycle, capturing heat from a stove, typing, even opening a door could generate small amounts of power. As engineers, I'm sure we could even harvest enegy from the gravitational pull of moon or the rotation of the earth. The biggest hurdle at present is cost and the limits of our imagination.
And yes, there already exists fitness clubs that harvest energy from stationary bicycles
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Himanshu_Gupta
6/30/2011 12:11 PM EDT
i find such research efforts mundane rather than breakthrough. We know the properties of piezo-material but the efficiency and the impact is quite little. Until and unless we can generate some significant energy from daily mundane task; we are not going anywhere.
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