| Author | Message | ||
     vocasla Unregistered guest |
I have had several ideas lately in attempt to find alternative energy sources. By now, I have come to accept that perpetual motion is not a possibility (and even if it was, we humans would probably never create such thing, even if we survived trillions of years of evolutionary thinking). My first idea is that you have a counterweight (of 10kg) lifted 2-3 meters in the air, that slowly rotates a gear system of a ratio of somwhere between 500-1000:1, so that the last gear spins very fast, fast enough to run a generator motor, to generate electrical energy. My hope for this is, is that it can last about 5 or 10 days that can power some appliances in the house without having to pay extra bills. you can just simply wind the counterweight back up when it has stopped. My second idea is that, instead of a counterweight, i can instead replace with a wind-up metal thing that uses elastic energy to convert into electrical energy. My third idea is that, you can have another renewable energy source by putting solenoids with very powerful magnets suspended in them, and positioned in a place where it is most likely to produce tremours in the ground i.e. a fault line where earthquakes are common (e.g. san andreas fault). this can move the magnets up and down, generating electricity. My fourth idea is that you can create some form of magnet-slippers and have the underneath of your house floor to be wrapped in a blanket of coils, so whenever you move about, you generate electricity, that can be stored in rechargeable batteries, etc. OR you an apply this principle to towns and cities where movements of people, cars, can be tapped to support everybodies electricity by wrapping undergrounds roads with solenoid coils, saving amples of energy. my fifth idea is that instead of drilling 10 km underground for geothermal energy sources, we use powerful lazers that will open a hole in the earth's crust releasing all the potential heat energy trapped within (i don't know if this would cause volcanoes to be born). use this to heat our water, our homes, and generate electricity. my sixth idea is to transform gyms all across the country into some form of generator where people who work out will convert all of their movement into electrical energy, that can iether power their treadmills, and portions of a town or city. OR you simply have a massive building where you hire people to ride bikes that generate electricity. tell me what you think! | ||
| Simon Quellen Field (sfield) New member Username: sfield Post Number: 152 Registered: 12-2004 |
Energy is measured in newton meters or joules. Your 10 kg mass on earth is 98 newtons. You lift it 3 meters and you have 294 newton meters, or 294 joules. Power is measured in watts, or joules per second. If it takes you 3 seconds to lift the 10 kg mass up to the 3 meter mark, you have a power of 294/3, or 98 watts. If the weight fell to the ground in 3 seconds while powering a perfecly efficient generator, it could light a 98 watt light bulb for those three seconds. Generating 98 watts in three seconds is hard work. You will not be able to do it for long. A fit bicyclist can generate 150 watts over a half hour period. The electric company measures energy in kilowatt hours. There are 3,600,000 joules in a kilowatt hour. The solar panels for my house generate power for a cost of about 9 cents per kilowatt hour (when you take the mortgage value of the panels into account). So pedaling for all you're worth for a half hour generates 75 watthours of energy, or 0.075 kilowatt hours, worth 0.675 cents. If your hard labor is worth less than a penny per hour, then you have a new career opportunity here. | ||
| Simon Quellen Field (sfield) New member Username: sfield Post Number: 153 Registered: 12-2004 |
The reason we use drills to bore holes in the ground instead of lasers, is that it is thousands of times cheaper. | ||
| lysdexia Unregistered guest |
weird name, there are already newsgroups for posting that stuff. ;) Why are you posting it here? The goal is to catch our energy, not to drain it! This is why wrist-powered wristwatches are so delicate. It's hard to cultivate muscle power into profit, but brain power is much easier. | ||
| Anonymous |
I liked those ideas vocasla gave. Why not convert a gym into power. Do you know how many people go to the gym in the US alone to work out? Another thing people fail to realize is that you dont have to collect energy all at once or use it all at once. If you collect small amounts of it continuously, you can then discharge the amounts you want at certain times. Nikola Tesla was very fond of this idea. To generate large amounts of energy, he would collect it in a capacitor and discharge it when the capacitor reached a certain value (all that typically happened in milliseconds worth of time.) Believe it or not, its more expensive to try to generate 1 megawatt of power all at once than it would be to generate a smaller amount continuously, storing it, and discharging it when needed. | ||
| Simon Quellen Field (Sfield) Senior Member Username: Sfield Post Number: 528 Registered: 12-2004 |
You are confusing energy with power. Energy is watt hours. Power is watts. If I deliver a watt in an hour, or a 3.6 billion watts in a microsecond, I am using the same amount of energy. But the first one is only a watt of power, and the second is 3.6 billion watts. This is why a snickers bar and a stick of dynamite can have the same energy, but entirely different power output. When I walk a mile at about 4 miles per hour, I burn 100 calories. 100 calories is 0.116 watt hours. Since I do that in 15 minutes, I am generating about a half watt. It would take a whole lot of people walking fast on treadmills to generate much electricity. There are about 300 million people in the U.S. If all of them were walking at 4 miles per hour for 24 hours a day, we could generate about 3 million kilowatt hours of electricity per day, averaging about 137 megawatts at any given time. A coal or nuclear power plant produces over 1,000 megawatts, all day long and can still do it the next day. |
