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RE: so how about actual efficiency?
By Raidin on 11/5/2008 1:04:05 PM , Rating: 2
Your rain-power idea is perfectly sound, just needs to be implemented differently. If you tried to capture the power of every rain drop on it's own, it would be very wasteful, because you'd need incredibly light material to negate as much of the force the rain drop exerts to simply move the material to create energy as possible, and you'd need to do this for as many rain drops as possible, which means an insane surface area for it to be remotely feasible or practical.

Instead, you could build a large cone to capture incoming rain and send it to a thin tube which has a paddle wheel at the end, and then you'd have yourself a mini hydroelectric power plant. =)

As far as 'dark' particles, no such thing. Light is made up of photons, darkness is made up of the lack of those photons being present. Darkness is the absence of light.

The thing most people don't usually know is that a small amount of light covering only a fraction of our planet has the potential to power the entire planet. If we get solar cells to a very high efficiency rating of light to power conversion, it wouldn't matter too much when it's dark, as the Sun will always be shining somewhere, which means power can be collected 24/7, it would just need to be distributed across the globe. This would allow virtually every solar plant on Earth to aid in powering the entire world.

Too bad we're a long way from that day.

RE: so how about actual efficiency?
By Chipper Smoltz DT on 11/5/2008 3:06:52 PM , Rating: 2
Hey thanks for the nice reply... I appreciate it. =)

I have this other weird idea... what if we could convert sound energy into electrical energy which could be stored. Just as a microphone amplifies sound by using "something" combined with an electric current.

Maybe what we could do is set up "gadgets" like these in very noisy areas and use all those noise to convert it into electrical energy and store them as well in a certain medium.

Are sound waves similar to light waves in that they are both a particle and a wave? Coz its like the inside of the human ear right? it's like a miniature thing that "vibrates" or something like that which causes us to hear sounds in the first place?

RE: so how about actual efficiency?
By Raidin on 11/5/2008 3:47:08 PM , Rating: 1
You're quite welcome.

Sound is different than light in terms of it's makeup. Sound is simply a vibration in a medium, moving as a wave. In our case, that medium is air, or the atmosphere in general.

You could theoretically set up a large sheet of super-thing, super-light material that could vibrate with any sound that passes through it (like a large version of an inner ear, and translate those vibrations to energy. problem is, most sound waves have inherently low energy potential, so you couldn't really build any useful power out of it. You'd need a lot of loud sound waves, and even then, you just might be able to power a tiny light bulb, if I am using the right scale in my head.

It's just not practical.

RE: so how about actual efficiency?
By Starcub on 11/7/2008 10:29:14 PM , Rating: 2
That "something" is a piezoelectric material. The material physically deforms due to physical stresses on the material's electronic lattice (usually due to acoustic vibration, but can be optically generated as well). As a result electrons are kicked out of the bonds and carried away by an externally applied power source. They are good signal detectors, but not good power generators.


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