01-11-2016, 12:15 PM
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Idea & Reference
Power Generation from footsteps
Due to a need to reduce carbon emissions and keep costs down, producing renewable energy is increasingly important for most governments and the tech industry at the moment. With that in mind investments are being made in the popular green energy sectors such as wind, solar, and wave energy. However, people’s steps (thousands upon thousands a day) utilize and channel kinetic energy too. An emerging startup called Pavegen has installed such squares of energy-generating pavement in London.
A slab of concrete harnesses kinetic energy whenever it is stepped on. This energy, created by 5 millimeters of flex in the material, is then either stored by lithium polymer batteries contained within the slabs or transmitted immediately to streetlights or other electronics located close by. The current model, made from stainless steel, recycled car tires and recycled aluminum, also includes a lamp embedded in the pavement that lights up every time a step is converted into energy (using only 5 percent of the generated energy).
In an effort to keep the production of the pavement as green and sustainable as possible, Pavegen partnered with Ryburn Rubber Limited and Advanced LEDs (which has also invested in the idea) to make sure that its components create as small an environmental impact as possible. Launched in July of this year, the company spun out of a project at Loughborough University.
The average square of pavement produces about 2.1 watts of electricity. And according to Pavegen, any one square of pavement in a high-foot traffic area can see 50,000 steps a day. Based on this data, only five units of Pavegen pavement can be enough to keep the lights on at a bus stop all night. The company, led by 24-year old founder Laurence Kemball-Cook, says it eventually wants its slabs to power automatic doors, ticket machines, neon signs, and even computers and major appliances.
Pavegen isn’t targeting its product exclusively at municipalities. One of its big ideas is to have stores located on busy sidewalks install them in front of their locations to power their signage or any internal electronics. To encourage this adoption, the company says it will brand its slabs for its commercial customers. The slabs installed in East London happen to be green (thus suggesting its clean-tech solution) but they come in a variety of colors. The company believes the embedded lamp is important to inform passersby of their contribution to the clean energy movement.
The startup plans to roll out more Pagevgen units in the United Kingdom in the next year, but it envisions installing them one day in Times Square in New York — think of all the electronic displays it could help power there — and other frequented locations in the U.S. One of the ideas pitched on its web site is to install slabs in subway turnstiles where thousands of people — about 36,000 per hour — walk a day to power station electronics.
The system from Pavegen makes a lot of sense in very busy public areas as it will constantly be generating energy which will no doubt mean the system pays for itself very quickly and then continues to cut energy costs, the need for extended power wires and carbon emissions. It also helps that they are self contained units meaning no expensive digging up of the ground surrounding them, thus making them easy to install. Pavegen is not the only company thinking this way and along their direct competition, we’re bound to see many other companies trying to develop their energy harvesting products for all the other activities we carry out regularly.
About our project
As per our reference we are using same technique in our project as shown below.We use one rack and pinion gear system with dynamo fixing with its gear mechanism.
Components required
1. Dynamo
2. Rack and pinion system
3. Gear for dynamo
4. Spring
5. Led
6. Wire
7. Slider
8. Body frame
1. Dynamo
A dynamo, originally another name for an electrical generator, now means a generator that produces direct current with the use of a commutator. Dynamos were the first electrical generators capable of delivering power for industry, and the foundation upon which many other later electric-power conversion devices were based, including the electric motor, the alternating-current alternator, and the rotary converter. They are rarely used for power generation now because of the dominance of alternating current, the disadvantages of the commutator, and the ease of converting alternating to direct current using solid state methods.
The word still has some regional usage as a replacement for the word generator. A small electrical generator built into the hub of a bicycle wheel to power lights is called a Hub dynamo.
Description
The dynamo uses rotating coils of wire and magnetic fields to convert mechanical rotation into a pulsing direct electric current through Faraday's law. A dynamo machine consists of a stationary structure, called the stator, which provides a constant magnetic field, and a set of rotating windings called the armature which turn within that field. On small machines the constant magnetic field may be provided by one or more permanent magnets; larger machines have the constant magnetic field provided by one or more electromagnets, which are usually called field coils.
The commutator was needed to produce direct current. When a loop of wire rotates in a magnetic field, the potential induced in it reverses with each half turn, generating an alternating current. However, in the early days of electric experimentation, alternating current generally had no known use. The few uses for electricity, such as electroplating, used direct current provided by messy liquid batteries. Dynamos were invented as a replacement for batteries. The commutator is a set of contacts mounted on the machine's shaft, which reverses the connection of the windings to the external circuit when the potential reverses, so instead of alternating current, a pulsing direct current is produced.
Historical milestones
The first electric generator was invented by Michael Faraday in 1831, a copper disk that rotated between the poles of a magnet. This was not a dynamo because it did not use a commutator. However, Faraday's disk generated very low voltage because of its single current path through the magnetic field. Faraday and others found that higher, more useful voltages could be produced by winding multiple turns of wire into a coil. Wire windings can conveniently produce any voltage desired by changing the number of turns, so they have been a feature of all subsequent generator designs, requiring the invention of the commutator to produce direct current.
Jedlik's dynamo
In 1827, Hungarian AnyosJedlik started experimenting with electromagnetic rotating devices which he called electromagnetic self-rotors. In the prototype of the single-pole electric starter, both the stationary and the revolving parts were electromagnetic. He formulated the concept of the dynamo about six years before Siemens and Wheatstone but did not patent it as he thought he was not the first to realize this. His dynamo used, instead of permanent magnets, two electromagnets opposite to each other to induce the magnetic field around the rotor.
Pixii's dynamo
The first dynamo based on Faraday's principles was built in 1832 by HippolytePixii, a French instrument maker. It used a permanent magnet which was rotated by a crank. The spinning magnet was positioned so that its north and south poles passed by a piece of iron wrapped with wire. Pixii found that the spinning magnet produced a pulse of current in the wire each time a pole passed the coil. However, the north and south poles of the magnet induced currents in opposite directions. To convert the alternating current to DC, Pixii invented a commutator, a split metal cylinder on the shaft, with two springy metal contacts that pressed against it.
Pacinotti dynamo
These early designs had a problem: the electric current they produced consisted of a series of "spikes" or pulses of current separated by none at all, resulting in a low average power output. Antonio Pacinotti, an Italian physics professor, solved this problem around 1860 by replacing the spinning two-pole axial coil with a multi-pole toroidal one, which he created by wrapping an iron ring with a continuous winding, connected to the commutator at many equally spaced points around the ring; the commutator being divided into many segments. This meant that some part of the coil was continually passing by the magnets, smoothing out current.
Siemens and Wheatstone dynamo (1867)
The first practical designs for a dynamo were announced independently and simultaneously by Dr. Werner Siemens and Charles Wheatstone. On January 17, 1867, Siemens announced to the Berlin academy a "dynamo-electric machine" (first use of the term) which employed a self-powering electromagnetic armature.On the same day that this invention was announced to the Royal Society Charles Wheatstone read a paper describing a similar design with the difference that in the Siemens design the armature was in series with the rotor, but in Wheatstone's design it was in parallel. The use of electromagnets rather than permanent magnets greatly increases the power output of a dynamo and enabled high power generation for the first time. This invention led directly to the first major industrial uses of electricity. For example, in the 1870s Siemens used electromagnetic dynamos to power electric arc furnaces for the production of metals and other materials.
Gramme ring dynamo
ZénobeGramme reinvented Pacinotti's design in 1871 when designing the first commercial power plants, which operated in Paris in the 1870s. Another advantage of Gramme's design was a better path for the magnetic flux, by filling the space occupied by the magnetic field with heavy iron cores and minimizing the air gaps between the stationary and rotating parts. The Gramme dynamo was the first machine to generate commercial quantities of power for industry. Further improvements were made on the Gramme ring, but the basic concept of a spinning endless loop of wire remains at the heart of all modern dynamos.
Discovery of electric motor principles
While not originally designed for the purpose, it was discovered that a dynamo can act as an electric motor when supplied with direct current from a battery or another dynamo. At an industrial exhibition in Vienna in 1873, Gramme noticed that the shaft of his dynamo began to spin when its terminals were accidentally connected to another dynamo producing electricity. Although this wasn't the first demonstration of an electric motor, it was the first practical one. It was found that the same design features which make a dynamo efficient also make a motor efficient. The efficient Gramme design, with small magnetic air gaps and many coils of wire attached to a many-segmented commutator, also became the basis for the design of all practical DC motors.
Large dynamos producing direct current were problematic in situations where two or more dynamos are working together and one has an engine running at a lower power than the other. The dynamo with the stronger engine will tend to drive the weaker as if it were a motor, against the rotation of the weaker engine. Such reverse-driving could feed back into the driving engine of a dynamo and cause a dangerous out of control reverse-spinning condition in the lower-power dynamo. It was eventually determined that when several dynamos all feed the same power source all the dynamos must be locked into synchrony using a jackshaft interconnecting all engines and rotors to counter these imbalances.
Dynamo as Commutated DC Generator
After the discovery of the AC Generator and that alternating current can in fact be useful for something, the word dynamo became associated exclusively with the commutated DC electric generator, while an AC electrical generator using either slip rings or rotor magnets would become known as an alternator.
An AC electric motor using either slip rings or rotor magnets was referred to as a synchronous motor, and a commutated DC electric motor could be called either an electric motor though with the understanding that it could in principle operate as a generator.
Rotary Converter Development
After dynamos were found to allow easy conversion back and forth between mechanical or electrical power, the new discovery was used to develop complex multi-field single-rotor devices with two or more commutators. These were known as a rotary converters. These devices were usually not burdened by mechanical loads, but watched just spinning on their own.
The rotary converter can directly convert, internally, any power source into any other. This includes direct current (DC) into alternating current (AC), 25 cycle AC into 60 cycle AC, or many different output currents at the same time. The size and mass of these was very large so that the rotor would act as a flywheel to help smooth out any sudden surges or dropouts.
The technology of rotary converters ruled until the development of vacuum tubes allowed for electronic oscillators. This eliminated the need for physically spinning rotors and commutators.