from the are-you-*sure*-that-will-scale-up? dept.
Converting the energy of a moving automobile into an efficient power source for that same automobile is one of the Holy Grails of motor transport, and new research suggests an important part of the solution could be to look at the friction generated between car tyres and the road itself.
Engineers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US have developed a nanogenerator that’s capable of harvesting the energy produced by the friction of a tyre rolling along the ground.
For those aren't going to RTFA no matter what: Their test vehicle was a toy car, so I've got some concerns about whether or not this will scale up to full-sized models. But if it does, it could potentially vast increase the range of electric cars, or allow them to use smaller batteries.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Kent_Diego on Tuesday July 07 2015, @08:06PM
1. It takes energy to generate energy. Since the energy conversion in not 100% efficient. why put this extra load on the batteries?
2. Costly extra mechanical complexity. Surly unreliable in long run.
3. Extra unsprung weight causes handling and ride issues not to mention loss of vehicle efficiency.
There must be more reasons this is a silly idea. Feel free to add on.
(Score: 2) by kaganar on Tuesday July 07 2015, @08:12PM
(Score: 3, Funny) by M. Baranczak on Tuesday July 07 2015, @10:06PM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Tuesday July 07 2015, @10:25PM
it may be no more stupid than regenerative breaking
Regenerative braking is a great idea if you want to slow down and get some of your kinetic energy back... Keeping your foot on the regenerative brake all the time so you're always getting energy back, however, is stupid - and based on the TFA and abstract, that's exactly what this idea sounds like. Maybe the real paper resolves this.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday July 08 2015, @11:05AM
From reading the writeup on the university website, I get the impression they are re-capturing the energy that goes into generating static charge (and ultimately heat). If so, and if it's significant, then this would make sense.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Wednesday July 08 2015, @12:08PM
The surprise there would be to find that the static charge accounted for any significant part of the frictional energy loss c.f. mechanical heating and noise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2015, @04:41PM
Now if they can also put LEDs in the sidewalls...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday July 07 2015, @09:27PM
It's not silly if you consider the generators may be embedded into the road. This way, you'll be paying your freeway toll by generating the energy proportional with the distance travelled and your vehicle weight
Imagine the bright future: all roads the same, no more toll roads, just... by using a road sealing fluffy enough to maximize the energy stolen from your vehicle.
G'day drivers
.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Refugee from beyond on Tuesday July 07 2015, @10:04PM
But since all cars in the future are electrical that means…
Instantly better soylentnews: replace background on article and comment titles with #973131.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @10:49PM
That means we need a massive increase in the capacity of the electrical grid. Years ago, I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation of the electrical requirements for replacing petroleum-based fuels with electricity. The energy per car was roughly the same order of magnitude as the electrical energy consumed by a typical home. Hence, the grid would have to double in capacity, assuming one car per house. Double the number of hydro dams, double the number of nukes, double the amount of coal burned, double the gas turbine plants, double the wind generators and solar photovoltaics etc.
I don't see how that is going to happen.
The only realistic solution is to reduce the size/power requirements of cars... substantially. The future of the automobile looks more like a bicycle.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday July 08 2015, @01:15AM
Yes, but assuming that the new load is mostly battery powered vehicles, it is much more amenable to time constrained charging.
A mix of local solar and off-peak grid would be able to handle it with much more modest improvements in delivery infrastructure.
You are still going to need either more generators or lots of solar.
AU where I live is heading that way. Solar installations are appearing on more roofs all the time. (14% of homes in 2014 had solar power)
The power companies have dropped the feed-in tariff so much that people are now load-shifting to avoid the feed-in/buy-back difference. (and now the companies are complaining about that)
Realistically, it is not yet worth going off-grid, but PV panels keep dropping in price and if cheap batteries come along that could change.
200 million years is actually quite a long time.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday July 08 2015, @12:54AM
Wait, I thought the tolls we were paying were so the road could power the car.
Now I need a bigger battery to power the road.
Damn politicians, get you coming and going!
Ohhhhh, maybe just drive BACKWARDs down the road to charge the car! Shhhhh, not so loud!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 08 2015, @02:20AM
Huh! Wishful thinking!
While it may happen, the private initiative must be encouraged: prepare yourself for the power sold to you on/by the road at a double price of the network: it's not "how you produce it" that determines the price, its the utility of it that you are charged for (and the "utility" will be defined as "emergency assistance for empty battery cases").
Also be prepared to be restricted on the amount of energy you use at home to recharge your car, we can't have it cheap for everybody (remember Enron?) and the world is warming up. Besides the current gas stations (to be converted) need to be kept working - you wouldn't want unemployment to rise, would you?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Interesting) by BigJ on Tuesday July 07 2015, @10:28PM
Ughh... yes this is a dumb idea. If the net result is to decrease rolling resistance (road-tire friction), there are proven ways to accomplish this:
1) return to hard compound rubber
2) increased tire pressure.
3) lower vehicle weight.
I understand that you could possibly just turn this feature on during deceleration, but isn't this what regenerative braking is already doing? Using the friction between the road and tire to spin the tire and thus the generator? How could this technique be additive?
(Score: 2) by Tramii on Tuesday July 07 2015, @08:15PM
For those aren't going to RTFA no matter what: Their test vehicle was a toy car, so I've got some concerns about whether or not this will scale up to full-sized models. But if it does, it could potentially vast increase the range of electric cars, or allow them to use smaller batteries.
The article actually talks about this:
... the researchers' findings, which are published this month in Nano Energy, suggest that the amount of energy harnessed is directly related to the weight of the car. In other words, the method will directly scale to real vehicles (meaning Barbie and Ken won't be the sole beneficiaries).
(Score: 2) by penguinoid on Wednesday July 08 2015, @07:47AM
It doesn't need to scale up with vehicle weight. It needs to be more energy-efficient than a rubber tire. That's the hard part.
And then, if it is to be of widespread use, it needs to be cheaper than other improvements that could be done instead (eg engine, aerodynamics).
RIP Slashdot. Killed by greedy bastards.
(Score: 4, Funny) by donkeyhotay on Tuesday July 07 2015, @09:08PM
It won't work on my car. My car has tires, not tyres.
'Murica!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday July 09 2015, @07:08PM
I see, your car is tired. Maybe it needs some coffee.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by skullz on Tuesday July 07 2015, @09:11PM
But isn't this just a retread of other failed ideas?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @09:11PM
Ethanol's penis might replace an entire nuclear reactor.
(Score: 2) by toygeek on Tuesday July 07 2015, @09:14PM
It's about energy conservation. Every little bit of energy that can be reclaimed can be reused, increasing overall energy efficiency even on a small scale. Every little bit counts, and the cumulative effects of many small efforts can make a big difference.
There is no Sig. Okay, maybe a short one. http://miscdotgeek.com
(Score: 3, Insightful) by slinches on Tuesday July 07 2015, @09:56PM
Yes, energy recovery is critical to improving efficiency, but it isn't clear to me that's what this invention is doing. Trying to make use of the triboelectric effect to generate power may just increase rolling resistance instead of recovering frictional waste energy and therefore be of no benefit.
The article didn't mention anything about the effect on rolling friction, so I will reserve judgment until that data is available.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday July 07 2015, @10:10PM
OK, so convince me that this is somehow harvesting the energy from the existing friction and not just adding a new source of rolling resistance. Does it stop the tyres from heating up? Does it reduce road noise? If not, its the equivalent of trying to power your car by mounting a windmill on top.
I'm sure they've thought of that (but it isn't evident from TFA).
(Score: 2) by toygeek on Tuesday July 07 2015, @10:15PM
I think it's more of "this energy is already being produced. Let's harvest it!" rather than "Hey lets put a windmill on top and change everything". I don't see this as anything more unusual than harvesting excess heat from the engine to warm the passenger compartment in the winter.
There is no Sig. Okay, maybe a short one. http://miscdotgeek.com
(Score: 5, Insightful) by theluggage on Tuesday July 07 2015, @10:59PM
I think it's more of "this energy is already being produced. Let's harvest it!" rather than "Hey lets put a windmill on top and change everything".
Yes, but TFA and the abstract don't justify the claim that the energy they're harvesting is already being produced. It's no good just saying how much energy their modified tyres generate, and that it went up with the speed of the car - they need to do a control to show that the new tyres didn't increase the energy needed to drive the car.
I'm assuming that the fault here is the journalists that uncritically wrote TFA without asking the important questions - presumably the actual inventors didn't pick up their PhDs on eBay, are somewhat acquainted with the laws of thermodynamics, and the full paper will explain everything. However, I'd have thought the 'how did we prove this was recovered frictional energy' issue was more worthy of a mention in the abstract than the colour of the bloody LEDs that they lit.
(Score: 2) by toygeek on Tuesday July 07 2015, @10:20PM
By the way if you read the article, the energy comes not from friction, but from the electricity generated by the rubber hitting the road, a static charge if I recall correctly.
There is no Sig. Okay, maybe a short one. http://miscdotgeek.com
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @10:39PM
The energy in the electricity ultimately comes from fuel for the engine in the vehicle. No way to get around the law of thermodynamics. Or conservation of energy. Or physics in general. Otherwise we'd all have invisible flying cars.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @10:47PM
1. You Can't Win.
2. You Can't Even Get Even.
3. You Can't Get Out Of The Game.
This "invention" seems to forget those laws.
(Score: 5, Funny) by theluggage on Tuesday July 07 2015, @11:06PM
Oh, but if you implement enough nanotechnology, crowdsource the power of the Cloud and fabricate it all on a 3D printer you'll enter an augmented reality in which the laws of physics, economics and even common sense don't apply until after you've cashed the cheque from the venture capitalists.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:09PM
4. You Can Lose by Less, though (aka efficiency)
(Score: 2) by toygeek on Tuesday July 07 2015, @11:00PM
http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/transportation/advanced-cars/nanogenerator-produces-energy-from-tires-rolling-on-pavement [ieee.org]
There is no Sig. Okay, maybe a short one. http://miscdotgeek.com
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday July 08 2015, @08:25AM
"The friction between the tire and the ground consumes about 10 percent of a vehicle’s fuel," said Xudong Wang, associate professor at Wisconsin-Madison, in a press release. "That energy is wasted. So if we can convert [some of it to electricity], it could give us very good improvement in fuel efficiency."
The friction is the *thing that makes the car go forwards*. Imagine slicks on wet ice - no friction, no freaking drive, just wheel-spinning.
"if we can convert some of it to electricity" - but you already said some of it's already being converted to static electricity, what's the "if"?
"very good" - give us a figure - make a concrete claim. That way we can kick you up the fucking arse with our heavy boots when you fail horribly.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by mobydisk on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:52PM
I propose that Soylent add an auto-blacklist where sites and/or specific article authors (not submitters - the author of the linked article) can be automatically refused. All articles linking to ScienceAlert, which is nothing but a clickbait site with bad science summaries, should be automatically trashed.
I moved to Soylent because of these kinds of poor-quality articles appearing on Slashdot. The article and summary make it sound like they are trying to generate a free energy machine, which they are not.
Converting the energy of a moving automobile into an efficient power source for that same automobile is one of the Holy Grails of motor transport
No it is not. It is not even a power source, and it is definitely not a holy grail of anything. The researcher made no such implication at all! That is like saying:
Converting the light from an LCD display into an efficient power source for that same display is one of the Holy Grails of display technology
Then the article says:
How efficient is the technique? Well, it won't be replacing gas or electric charging stations any time soon,
True! It will never replace gas or electric charging stations, because it is not meant to be a power source at all!
I visited the site, and it is nothing but oversimplified clickbait article headlines with great big pictures. This makes me wonder if I could make a fully automated news site. It would:
- Scan for news headlines
- Submit the text to a Google image search
- Overlay the headline and the image
- Run one of those auto-summarizers on the results
- Alternative: Submit a Mechanical Turk bid to create a summary of the article
- Insert ads
- Profit!