© Vibro-Wind Research Group
Cities have just as much wind as rural areas, but the space is less plentiful. To harness the wind energy in places without enough space for the 30-foot long blades of a wind turbine, researchers and students at Cornell University are working to harness wind vibrations for energy.
The idea is to make wind energy a possibility for people in every part of the country. Researchers want to bring wind energy from the farms to people's roofs, the way it's possible to install solar panels on your house.
It still takes a true altruist to install solar panels on their roofs, however. While the price of a kilowatt hour of wind energy has dropped steadily to prices that rival coal, the average price of a kilowatt hour of solar energy is still much higher.
And it's expensive to build a wind turbine of any size. The vibro-wind panels, as they're called, are inexpensive and don't take up a lot of space. They work by converting the vibrations from blowing wind into electricity. Converting the mechanical energy of motion into electricity requires a piezoelectric transducer, a device made of a ceramic or polymer that emits electrons when stressed.
The team's prototype is made of a grid of foam pieces, each one containing a piezoelectric transducer. When the wind blows, the foam pieces vibrate and put stress on the piezoelectric device. Electrons are generated and travel down wires to a battery.
The foam pieces are sensitive enough to capture energy from the gentlest of breezes.
As if finding an inexpensive and convenient method of providing renewable energy weren't enough of a challenge, researchers also had to integrate the panels with the design of the buildings they were placed on.
More research still needs to be done, but early findings show wind vibration energy is a source of hope for finding a way to getting cheap and sustainable energy in populated areas.
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