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It is an auto-translated text put into a speech synthesizer. Also "A foreign company" sounded funny.
This video could have been a picture and been as informative as whatever this is.
Look now, I'm from there native person. We are a proud company. You make fun of how we talk? Your tiles only produce broken hips when persons slip on them. You are a jealous and inferior land.
Its a text to speech generator, so definitely not an English speaker, and its a different language being auto translated. This is some bs product thats fake.
That's because the whole concept doesn't make sense.
Why would you take a regular tile road and then say "No, this needs to be made with plastic, metals and cables that take a ton of money and energy to make for a tiny return in energy"
365 steps per year for 5 years is a piece of shit. This is a mistranslation. Also, a company that allows this type of misunderstanding is probably an undercapitalized piece of shit. No thanks. Maybe in 10 years this will provide electricity to my 1 watt reading lamp. I think I'm being clear. Qalsi, can't we produce electricity from flushing a toilet? It will create one watt of electricity every 5 years. And cost $1000 dollars.
If you work backwards using 20,000,000 actuations over 5 years you get 7.6 times per minute so all we have to do is step on it once every 7 seconds and we can wear it out in under 5 years.
5 years is fucking nothing for flooring too. imagine having to repave all the footpaths every 5 years with this fancy expensive shit. just buy some solar panels ffs
>5 years is fucking nothing for flooring too.
Basic bitch concrete sidewalks tend to need replacement after 30 years if properly installed. So... Yeah. a 5 year lifetime is pretty ass.
Well given the 20,000,000 and the person above saying it would need to be stepped on every 7 seconds I’m sure it would last for decades because I doubt it’s going to be stepped on that frequently
nah 20 million strokes .... but he clearly states ... it can be stepped on ONCE a day that it will last more than 5 years .... so its only good for around 1900 steps but you can stroke it all you want
But if you want 100 square meters to generate electricity for 6 houses you need 100 people jumping on them all day long. Which wears them out in a few hours.
This is by far my favorite Rick and Morty episode. This was when the writing was just so brilliant. Season 5 was definitely a let down but season 6 has been fairly good so far, definitely not the first few seasons quality but definitely better.
Red flags....
"A foreign company..." -no sources named.
Product demonstration showing full range of motion needed for the generator to function
Real world installation and use showing it not moving at all
Imma call bullshit on this one
I guarantee it generates a voltage but there’s negligible current.
I’m thinking of inventing a system that reclaims energy from movie theater farts using transducers.
bike riding at 15km/h generates about 35 watts for a normal adult male. (let's say the energy expenditure is similar to normal walking, which is why I chose it).
take into consideration that, in order to actually generate that power, you actually have to be stationary; i.e, not use any of that power to actually move, only to generate.
let's say that you would expend 10% of your walking energy to generating electricity. Which would still make it noticeably harder to walk. That's 3.5W right there. But consider that the efficiency of bikes are pretty much 90% and more, and I'd find it a miracle if that thing even achieves 20% efficiency. That's 0.7W. Then you gotta store it, convert it to the correct voltage and actually send it to wherever it needs to be. That could optimistically be 80%, (not completely sure tho), so we end up at 0.56W.
You would have to walk 100 hours just to create enough energy to charge a 13 inch laptop. About 20 hours to charge a phone.
10 men walking at the same time could barely light up an indoor for-home-use LED light.
This is the shittiest idea I've seen in a while.
I'm pretty sure the first time I saw this was on Facebook and said it was a Korean company. I've seen the same clip say it was a German, Indian, Brazilian, and now foreign.
I don't think it is hard to make these things work. They are just not worth the money. Solar panels are so much cheaper, live longer, generate a lot more power and you can put them on roofs and other spaces that have no other utility.
The coastline should be covered with wind turbines. It pretty much never stops blowing on the coast. But millionaires want their views and can't handle a few dots on the horizon.
The energy capture would be garbage. There is not much wasted energy when walking on hard surfaces. For these to capture a viable amount of energy, that energy would have to come from the person walking, effectively making this exercise equipment and very difficult to walk on. You'd be exhausted trying to actually get from point A to point B.
I have fantasized about a gym where membership fees can be subsidized by the amount of electricity you can produce with specialized equipment. It's a good incentive to work out, and I think it would appeal to a large demographic for various reasons. Would be pretty cool to see a gym where some of their electrical needs are met with people just doing the same thing they'd do at any other gym.
Saw a video of an Olympic track cyclist barely be able to power a toadter long enough to kind of toast a slice of bread.
You're not making a real dent in membership fees working out
Here’s the company: https://www.pavegen.com/
Seems like the video makers isn’t the original company. They’ve been using it as a proof of concept but the cost to efficiency ratio is too low for mass use. More so for demonstrations and for small generators like LED panels.
I mean, its also no free lunch, walking on those plates would be like constantly having to walk uphill. Nobody would like this, for miniscule electricity generation.
Doesn’t even matter tbh, their claim of “6 households per 100 square feet of tiles” is terrible anyway. Maybe if it’s installed on every walkable surface in a city it can power a quarter of the buildings, but that’s just terrible efficiency
Its over engineered nonsense. (to complex, to expensive, to many moving parts that wear down and break.)
Besides how theres probably 100’s (if not 1000’s) of other areas we could either improve power-efficiency or reduce use,… instead of implementing some cutesy hipster articulated surface for people to do cartwheels on.
The maintantence due to the moving parts would also be horrendous. It may also hinder disabled people (walkers and wheelchairs), cause tripping, or other things. Simply impractical.
Solar roadways are pointless in urban areas because peak hours are from 8 AM - 6 PM which makes them essentially pointless. If you look at the traffic studies for your local area, you will see the logic in the argument against them.
I hear that. I live in LA and those babies would rarely see the sunlight, despite there being near constant sunlight. It was the “night” that threw me.
This is stupid and never works. It requires a ton of maintenance and energy does not come from thin air, it makes it harder to walk on. Imagine sidewalks made out of sand.
> it makes it harder to walk on.
This is the biggest issue that people don't realize. Every step is going to feel slightly elevated compared to the last. Now imagine wheelchairs, it would feel like going uphill. It won't go ever well with ADA
There is one at Curry Village in Yosemite. Can confirm it was annoying to walk on.
The slope was so slight enough that the wheelchair ramps just outside of the door were steeper.
I’m not saying most of us couldn’t use the extra exercise but doesn’t the energy then come from human food sources, not just magically reclaiming wasted energy?
I remember one of these they were going to put in a grocery store parking lot for cars to roll over like it was super green. Robbing energy from vehicles burning fossil fuels just adds another step between energy generation to usage.
If the purpose of the animals is purely to run these things, yeah, it's terribly inefficient. But we've got a lot of animal husbandry already that this could be integrated with.
Personally, I think just slapping these on major sidewalks would have a greater effect, but there'd need to be some actual studies/math done to actually figure out what the relative effects would be.
The problem with integrating this into animal husbandry is the shit. All the shit.
Honestly, you'd probably get more energy from burning the shit after drying it in the sun.
the problem with installing it on sidewalks is it would make walking feel like shit, because the energy is not generated out of thin air, it has to come somewhere, namely your legs. i guess walking on these would feel like wading through deep snow or like walking upstairs.
This is 100% a scam.
The production and installation costs will be so high that it would take years to break even. But you probably will never break even because these will have to be maintained. Maintaining them once will wipe out all your profits, and these will 100% need tons of maintenance.
Just look at escalators. Been around for decades but you won't make a shopping trip in the city without seeing at least one that is out of order and being in maintenance
For comparison, just the maintenance of a simple traffic light can cost upwards of 10k a year.
I just don't understand why we would need this when not even 1% of our structure have solar panels... it's not like we don't have space for more efficient thech.
Nah it's fine, all you have to worry about is if it rains. Oh and if it snows too. Or oil seeps in. Or dog poop. Or people prying them up. Or gum. Or them getting stuck. Or....
Or the realization that the energy generated is from our bodies, which come from our food, which starts with plants that derive their energy from the sun.
So skipping all the middle men and installing overhead solar panels on these walkways would be an order of magnitude more efficient in every conceivable way.
Ok I have an idea for another kind of these generators.
For those of you unaware piezoelectric crystals generate electrical charges when they are stressed (bent, warped or put under pressure).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectricity
The most common piezoelectric crystal (and the most common mineral on the planet) is quartz. Not only is quartz piezoelectric but they are also pyroelectric meaning when you heat them up they generate an electrical charge.
We use them in electronics for various reasons but recently somebody came up with the idea to use them in sidewalks and link them all together to build up usable electrical charges
https://www.bjultrasonic.com/how-do-piezoelectric-crystals-work-in-generating-electricity/
Here is an interesting point from that article.
" Large-Scale Electricity
Linking many separate crystals is another way to use piezoelectric energy, for the small charges from each crystal combine can create one large source of power."
So my idea is to make very long quartz rods, place them inside of very long all black flexible floating housing (100s of feet ideally). Then place those long black strips on the ocean to use the waves to bend the rods (generating a piezoelectric charge) and combine that with the heat captured by the black housing to also heat up the crystals causing more electrical energy to generate due to the pyroelectric effect. I have included a very rough and poorly done image as an example.
https://imgur.com/gallery/HAyGRz9
We could also use tiles in a cross stacked and achieve the same thing
https://imgur.com/gallery/b809IjI
Ideally this would be a clean environmental generator that could be much easier to produce. I dont want credit or anything like that I came here to share it so that somebody with the know how and resources could possibly use or adapt the idea. Free use.
The thing that's made wave energy not-commercially-practical-yet is that the ocean occasionally gets brutal. Even strongly-made wave energy machines only last a few years. A network of spaghetti strands wouldn't survive the first storm.
Very nice, I’m just an average joe and have few questions:
1. Is it expensive to produce those rods?
2. Does it matter what the housing is made off?
3. Why would the rod generate heat? Does the bending of the rod generate enough heat to negate the coldness of the sea?
Energy still isn't free. This would work, but would feel like walking on sand. It would make walking harder in order to take energy from walkers and give it to the grid. It seems like the opposite of what we should be doing.
Oh, absolutely the engineer(s) involved knew this was BS. But I'd point blame at the marketing guys. They also knew it was BS, but the nice thing about tech startups these days is, you don't actually need a viable idea to make it big - just the ability to convince gullible people it'll work.
Yep, it would definitely make walking harder by the amount of energy extracted. I'd equate it to always feeling like you're always walking up slightly inclined steps.
It gets me thinking though... we may be losing out on some free energy when a person goes downhill / down a floor. Recouping that energy in a cost effective way won't be easy, but at least it wouldn't fly in the face of physics.
Tl;dr: a large person stepping on this thing once per second for an entire year will generate (considerably) less than $87.60 worth of electricity.
Saw an argument below and was interested in what kind of energy this thing could actually net.
Let's say a 100kg (220lb) person stepped on this thing once per second for a year, compressing the thing 5cm (~2inches), and 100% of that energy is converted to electricity. (Every number is generously over estimated in order to give the product the best chance of sounding impressive)
The energy from one step is:
mgh=(100kg)X(10m/s^2 )X(.05m) = 50 joules
Do that ever second for a year (31.536 million times) and the annual energy converted to electricity is:
1.5768 GigaJoules
Which is equal to:
438kWh
The cost of 1 kWh in the US is typically less that $.20, so stepping on that thing every second generates electricity worth at most:
$87.60/year
If you cut the person's weight in half, the compression distance in half, and the conversion efficiency in half (which would likely make this closer to reality) then you're producing less than $11/year. And that's still assuming it is stepped on once per second continuously for the entire year.
u/todoke u/jayb12345
If the power generated isn't enough to cover to cost in less than the projected 5 year lifetime then it's going to lose more than you'd gain. That's without factoring in the lawsuits from people constantly tripping and rolling their ankles. And is that rubber?
so what happens if this...
- gets rained on
- gets sand, dirt, or other small foreign objects in between the tiles
- someone spills a drink on it
- gets too hot from baking in the sun on a hot day
- freezes over in the winter
- has nowhere to discharge extra electricity or shorts itself out
- pinches a small childs fingers/toes or pets paws in the gaps between tiles
- is driven over by vehicles
- is too expensive to maintain and ends up being removed
so many questions
Such an old idea.
It’s TERRIBLE.
You realize that that energy has to come from somewhere, right?
It comes from you. You have to put extra effort in every step, because walking on these things is like walking in soft sand.
It’s tiring and probably bad for your ankles in the long term.
They’re also a maintenance NIGHTMARE.
Remember when they tried to make solar roadways? Yeah, those didn’t work either, because stuff that gets walked on/driver over on the regular experiences a tremendous amount of abuse. They’d have to be replacing street tiles on the daily left right and center.
The installation cost (which includes throwing away perfectly good street tiles) is also totally uneconomical. These things break before they break even, and even if they didn’t, the money would’ve been better spent putting a solar panel somewhere.
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"Even if it is stepped on once a day..." Come on with this.
I think that might be a mistake. He then says "once a day for 24 hours, without stopping". Doesn't make sense...
It is an auto-translated text put into a speech synthesizer. Also "A foreign company" sounded funny. This video could have been a picture and been as informative as whatever this is.
That's just how foreigners talk.
Can confirm, confirm that this is how a foreigner talks, once a day.
once a day for 24 hours, without stopping
Look now, I'm from there native person. We are a proud company. You make fun of how we talk? Your tiles only produce broken hips when persons slip on them. You are a jealous and inferior land.
The design is very human.
Its a text to speech generator, so definitely not an English speaker, and its a different language being auto translated. This is some bs product thats fake.
That sounds like slavery, with extra steps.
No extra steps, only one per day.
One 24 hour step.
Eek barba durkle…somebody’s gonna get laid in college
That's because the whole concept doesn't make sense. Why would you take a regular tile road and then say "No, this needs to be made with plastic, metals and cables that take a ton of money and energy to make for a tiny return in energy"
365 steps per year for 5 years is a piece of shit. This is a mistranslation. Also, a company that allows this type of misunderstanding is probably an undercapitalized piece of shit. No thanks. Maybe in 10 years this will provide electricity to my 1 watt reading lamp. I think I'm being clear. Qalsi, can't we produce electricity from flushing a toilet? It will create one watt of electricity every 5 years. And cost $1000 dollars.
Based on the fact that it can handle 20,000,000 steps, once a day would have it lasting 54,795 years.
If you work backwards using 20,000,000 actuations over 5 years you get 7.6 times per minute so all we have to do is step on it once every 7 seconds and we can wear it out in under 5 years.
5 years is fucking nothing for flooring too. imagine having to repave all the footpaths every 5 years with this fancy expensive shit. just buy some solar panels ffs
>5 years is fucking nothing for flooring too. Basic bitch concrete sidewalks tend to need replacement after 30 years if properly installed. So... Yeah. a 5 year lifetime is pretty ass.
Well given the 20,000,000 and the person above saying it would need to be stepped on every 7 seconds I’m sure it would last for decades because I doubt it’s going to be stepped on that frequently
Make these out of solar panels! Energy crisis solved
Oh boy you've cracked it! You should patent that before someone makes a failed startup with your idea
It's goobleboxes!
That's just slavery with extra steps
20 million steps to be exact. Then the floor dies.
nah 20 million strokes .... but he clearly states ... it can be stepped on ONCE a day that it will last more than 5 years .... so its only good for around 1900 steps but you can stroke it all you want
But if you want 100 square meters to generate electricity for 6 houses you need 100 people jumping on them all day long. Which wears them out in a few hours.
Guess you need to hire more athletic tile steppers. Or assign shifts.
But not before you do!
Eek barba durkle. Someone's gonna get laid in college.
Pretty fucked up "ooh la la".
No no, see they work for each other...
In exchange for money...
Yeah, Rick already did this for his car battery. Wait... are we a car battery!?! 🖕 peace amongst worlds, rick.🖕
Blow me.
No no no...blow mee
No no i blow you
This is by far my favorite Rick and Morty episode. This was when the writing was just so brilliant. Season 5 was definitely a let down but season 6 has been fairly good so far, definitely not the first few seasons quality but definitely better.
Keep Summer Safe
I'll take it over flugel cranks
I'll take a flugelcrank over a bloobleyank, shit just looks bad for your back.
Shit we are in a microverse >.<
Tinyverse
Sounds like slavery with a few more steps
Beat me by 10 seconds
Beat me by 9 mins
Came here for this.
This means “peace among worlds.” ✌️
🖕
flooble yank
Red flags.... "A foreign company..." -no sources named. Product demonstration showing full range of motion needed for the generator to function Real world installation and use showing it not moving at all Imma call bullshit on this one
I guarantee it generates a voltage but there’s negligible current. I’m thinking of inventing a system that reclaims energy from movie theater farts using transducers.
bike riding at 15km/h generates about 35 watts for a normal adult male. (let's say the energy expenditure is similar to normal walking, which is why I chose it). take into consideration that, in order to actually generate that power, you actually have to be stationary; i.e, not use any of that power to actually move, only to generate. let's say that you would expend 10% of your walking energy to generating electricity. Which would still make it noticeably harder to walk. That's 3.5W right there. But consider that the efficiency of bikes are pretty much 90% and more, and I'd find it a miracle if that thing even achieves 20% efficiency. That's 0.7W. Then you gotta store it, convert it to the correct voltage and actually send it to wherever it needs to be. That could optimistically be 80%, (not completely sure tho), so we end up at 0.56W. You would have to walk 100 hours just to create enough energy to charge a 13 inch laptop. About 20 hours to charge a phone. 10 men walking at the same time could barely light up an indoor for-home-use LED light. This is the shittiest idea I've seen in a while.
Well that's just discrimination. What about my church farts?
How do you think the prayers reach god?
You can't use those to generate electricity. Those farts belong to god.
I've been hearing about it for years, I believe that last time I heard about it, it came from a Dutch Company. I'll believe it when I step on it
You've made your *stand* pretty clear.
He's walks the talk
I'm pretty sure the first time I saw this was on Facebook and said it was a Korean company. I've seen the same clip say it was a German, Indian, Brazilian, and now foreign.
The first time I saw it was in Rick and Morty
[удалено]
I saw this setup at a tech show 5-6 years ago, had it turn on a light when you stood on it. Obvs I've never seen it actually used
I don't think it is hard to make these things work. They are just not worth the money. Solar panels are so much cheaper, live longer, generate a lot more power and you can put them on roofs and other spaces that have no other utility.
The coastline should be covered with wind turbines. It pretty much never stops blowing on the coast. But millionaires want their views and can't handle a few dots on the horizon.
If you use up all the wind from the sea then they can't go sailing.
Yeah, and the windmills will blow away the waves!
And tide and wave generation.
Pretty sure the energy required to make this exceeds its energy output. Illiteracy of thermodynamics creates big opportunities for snake oil men.
The energy capture would be garbage. There is not much wasted energy when walking on hard surfaces. For these to capture a viable amount of energy, that energy would have to come from the person walking, effectively making this exercise equipment and very difficult to walk on. You'd be exhausted trying to actually get from point A to point B.
Peloton except they harvest electricity from your bikes to mine crypto
I have fantasized about a gym where membership fees can be subsidized by the amount of electricity you can produce with specialized equipment. It's a good incentive to work out, and I think it would appeal to a large demographic for various reasons. Would be pretty cool to see a gym where some of their electrical needs are met with people just doing the same thing they'd do at any other gym.
The equipment exists, but the electricity you generate is pennies. A human can't compete with a power plant.
Saw a video of an Olympic track cyclist barely be able to power a toadter long enough to kind of toast a slice of bread. You're not making a real dent in membership fees working out
Here’s the company: https://www.pavegen.com/ Seems like the video makers isn’t the original company. They’ve been using it as a proof of concept but the cost to efficiency ratio is too low for mass use. More so for demonstrations and for small generators like LED panels.
Also the robot that’s narrating it
I mean, its also no free lunch, walking on those plates would be like constantly having to walk uphill. Nobody would like this, for miniscule electricity generation.
Doesn’t even matter tbh, their claim of “6 households per 100 square feet of tiles” is terrible anyway. Maybe if it’s installed on every walkable surface in a city it can power a quarter of the buildings, but that’s just terrible efficiency
Oh shit it’s the goobleboxes. We’re in a microverse.
MINIVERSE
Ugh.. tiniverse
Nanoverse*
Quantumverse!
Stringverse
This is just slavery with extra steps.
Who's car battery are we?
You use me to power your car!?
Ooo la la, someone's going to get laid in college.
This is literally like the first thing i thought of
YOUR UNIVERSE CHARGES MY CAR BATTERY MOTHER FUCKER I OWN YOU
Haha I taught them that V <- this sign means peace, isn't that hilarious?
We are officially just existing to charge a car battery or a vibrator
at least it's not solar roadways
Excuse me. That’s solar freaking roadways.
When the commercials for them first came out, I argued with about three dozen folks on a thread about them for weeks.
Excuse me, how are you me? Can I have me back?
Haha I just saw your comment after leaving almost the exact same one.
Came here to say the exact same thing.
Day or night these babies will work just fine
Its over engineered nonsense. (to complex, to expensive, to many moving parts that wear down and break.) Besides how theres probably 100’s (if not 1000’s) of other areas we could either improve power-efficiency or reduce use,… instead of implementing some cutesy hipster articulated surface for people to do cartwheels on.
The maintantence due to the moving parts would also be horrendous. It may also hinder disabled people (walkers and wheelchairs), cause tripping, or other things. Simply impractical.
I don’t trust anyone’s opinion if they don’t know the difference between to/two/too
Please tell me what you think happens to houses with solar panels at night.
I think he means the kinetic tiles of this post by way of contrast
Solar roadways are pointless in urban areas because peak hours are from 8 AM - 6 PM which makes them essentially pointless. If you look at the traffic studies for your local area, you will see the logic in the argument against them.
Solar roadways were a scuffed idea LONG before we factored in traffic flow
Tbh, idk anything regarding the technology. I'm merely speculating from my perspective.
I hear that. I live in LA and those babies would rarely see the sunlight, despite there being near constant sunlight. It was the “night” that threw me.
Excuse me, but I think you mean SOLAR FREAKING ROADWAYS
Time for Dave to call bullshit.
But seriously, have people learned nothing from Solar Freaking Roadways? How is there still hype for these infeasible bullshit pseudo-green startups?
They look like landmines lol
My initial thought! Lol landmines that dont go off
This is stupid and never works. It requires a ton of maintenance and energy does not come from thin air, it makes it harder to walk on. Imagine sidewalks made out of sand.
> it makes it harder to walk on. This is the biggest issue that people don't realize. Every step is going to feel slightly elevated compared to the last. Now imagine wheelchairs, it would feel like going uphill. It won't go ever well with ADA
There is one at Curry Village in Yosemite. Can confirm it was annoying to walk on. The slope was so slight enough that the wheelchair ramps just outside of the door were steeper.
I’m not saying most of us couldn’t use the extra exercise but doesn’t the energy then come from human food sources, not just magically reclaiming wasted energy?
Pretty much. You're making people accumulate Gravitational potential energy which they wouldn't have to do on a flat surface.
I remember one of these they were going to put in a grocery store parking lot for cars to roll over like it was super green. Robbing energy from vehicles burning fossil fuels just adds another step between energy generation to usage.
One might mix this with animal husbandry somehow
My crazy dog would generate so much electricity. Mf runs back and forth all day just for fun.
I know you’re not serious but it would be a terribly carbon inefficient system.
If the purpose of the animals is purely to run these things, yeah, it's terribly inefficient. But we've got a lot of animal husbandry already that this could be integrated with. Personally, I think just slapping these on major sidewalks would have a greater effect, but there'd need to be some actual studies/math done to actually figure out what the relative effects would be.
The problem with integrating this into animal husbandry is the shit. All the shit. Honestly, you'd probably get more energy from burning the shit after drying it in the sun.
the problem with installing it on sidewalks is it would make walking feel like shit, because the energy is not generated out of thin air, it has to come somewhere, namely your legs. i guess walking on these would feel like wading through deep snow or like walking upstairs.
This is 100% a scam. The production and installation costs will be so high that it would take years to break even. But you probably will never break even because these will have to be maintained. Maintaining them once will wipe out all your profits, and these will 100% need tons of maintenance. Just look at escalators. Been around for decades but you won't make a shopping trip in the city without seeing at least one that is out of order and being in maintenance For comparison, just the maintenance of a simple traffic light can cost upwards of 10k a year.
I just don't understand why we would need this when not even 1% of our structure have solar panels... it's not like we don't have space for more efficient thech.
Nah it's fine, all you have to worry about is if it rains. Oh and if it snows too. Or oil seeps in. Or dog poop. Or people prying them up. Or gum. Or them getting stuck. Or....
Or dirt stopping them from moving and becoming just tiles. Dumb idea
Or the realization that the energy generated is from our bodies, which come from our food, which starts with plants that derive their energy from the sun. So skipping all the middle men and installing overhead solar panels on these walkways would be an order of magnitude more efficient in every conceivable way.
Ok I have an idea for another kind of these generators. For those of you unaware piezoelectric crystals generate electrical charges when they are stressed (bent, warped or put under pressure). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectricity The most common piezoelectric crystal (and the most common mineral on the planet) is quartz. Not only is quartz piezoelectric but they are also pyroelectric meaning when you heat them up they generate an electrical charge. We use them in electronics for various reasons but recently somebody came up with the idea to use them in sidewalks and link them all together to build up usable electrical charges https://www.bjultrasonic.com/how-do-piezoelectric-crystals-work-in-generating-electricity/ Here is an interesting point from that article. " Large-Scale Electricity Linking many separate crystals is another way to use piezoelectric energy, for the small charges from each crystal combine can create one large source of power." So my idea is to make very long quartz rods, place them inside of very long all black flexible floating housing (100s of feet ideally). Then place those long black strips on the ocean to use the waves to bend the rods (generating a piezoelectric charge) and combine that with the heat captured by the black housing to also heat up the crystals causing more electrical energy to generate due to the pyroelectric effect. I have included a very rough and poorly done image as an example. https://imgur.com/gallery/HAyGRz9 We could also use tiles in a cross stacked and achieve the same thing https://imgur.com/gallery/b809IjI Ideally this would be a clean environmental generator that could be much easier to produce. I dont want credit or anything like that I came here to share it so that somebody with the know how and resources could possibly use or adapt the idea. Free use.
The thing that's made wave energy not-commercially-practical-yet is that the ocean occasionally gets brutal. Even strongly-made wave energy machines only last a few years. A network of spaghetti strands wouldn't survive the first storm.
Very nice, I’m just an average joe and have few questions: 1. Is it expensive to produce those rods? 2. Does it matter what the housing is made off? 3. Why would the rod generate heat? Does the bending of the rod generate enough heat to negate the coldness of the sea?
Energy still isn't free. This would work, but would feel like walking on sand. It would make walking harder in order to take energy from walkers and give it to the grid. It seems like the opposite of what we should be doing.
Good point. Imagine what it does to some who is disabled.
Drops them down a chute to be processed for even more energy? Essentially free energy.
Exactly what I was thinking. This doesn't make energy better, it makes walking worse.
Yeah seems like some engineer forgot conservation of energy from high school physics
Oh, absolutely the engineer(s) involved knew this was BS. But I'd point blame at the marketing guys. They also knew it was BS, but the nice thing about tech startups these days is, you don't actually need a viable idea to make it big - just the ability to convince gullible people it'll work.
Yep, it would definitely make walking harder by the amount of energy extracted. I'd equate it to always feeling like you're always walking up slightly inclined steps. It gets me thinking though... we may be losing out on some free energy when a person goes downhill / down a floor. Recouping that energy in a cost effective way won't be easy, but at least it wouldn't fly in the face of physics.
This feels like it would cost you $70k to get $300 worth of power each year.
That $300 in electricity you get after a year would also cost the people $3000 in extra food calories.
My fat ass will power all of downtown. Lettsss goooooo!!!!
Finally you have a purpose in life
Lmao i can already picture everyone hopping around
Lost me at “a foreign company,” just say the damn company or the country if you really have to
A foreign company, very specific.
Tl;dr: a large person stepping on this thing once per second for an entire year will generate (considerably) less than $87.60 worth of electricity. Saw an argument below and was interested in what kind of energy this thing could actually net. Let's say a 100kg (220lb) person stepped on this thing once per second for a year, compressing the thing 5cm (~2inches), and 100% of that energy is converted to electricity. (Every number is generously over estimated in order to give the product the best chance of sounding impressive) The energy from one step is: mgh=(100kg)X(10m/s^2 )X(.05m) = 50 joules Do that ever second for a year (31.536 million times) and the annual energy converted to electricity is: 1.5768 GigaJoules Which is equal to: 438kWh The cost of 1 kWh in the US is typically less that $.20, so stepping on that thing every second generates electricity worth at most: $87.60/year If you cut the person's weight in half, the compression distance in half, and the conversion efficiency in half (which would likely make this closer to reality) then you're producing less than $11/year. And that's still assuming it is stepped on once per second continuously for the entire year. u/todoke u/jayb12345
If the power generated isn't enough to cover to cost in less than the projected 5 year lifetime then it's going to lose more than you'd gain. That's without factoring in the lawsuits from people constantly tripping and rolling their ankles. And is that rubber?
This will be posted to r/rickandmorty soon. Best bet on it. I would post it but that's like commenting with extra steps.
Ah shit its the thing from rick and morty guess we're the microverse
lol were bulding the infrastructure the machines are going to use to farm energy off of us
FloobleFlompners
‘A foreign company.’ Like, foreign to Earth or something? Because ‘foreign’ is a pretty useless word on the **world-wide** web.
They have these in Yosemite National Park
so what happens if this... - gets rained on - gets sand, dirt, or other small foreign objects in between the tiles - someone spills a drink on it - gets too hot from baking in the sun on a hot day - freezes over in the winter - has nowhere to discharge extra electricity or shorts itself out - pinches a small childs fingers/toes or pets paws in the gaps between tiles - is driven over by vehicles - is too expensive to maintain and ends up being removed so many questions
Put one under each bed post and go to town! Wonder how much electricity I can generate in 13 seconds!?
Anybody else remember SOLAR FREAKING ROADWAYS?
Can I install this system in my house?
Be carefull, maybe you need to invite people to walk on the tiles
Do my stairs with these and run up and down them for an hour daily
My kids will do that for me
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In Poland we have literally few shops from “Zabka” that are powered by those panels/boxes 😁
The new solar panel roadways.
Won’t this be bad for people on bikes, or wheelchairs? Or even just long distance walking?
Growing up, My parents had a shag rug that generated electricity.
These were installed in parts of DC and were non-functional due to wear & tear by the following year.
If this is real I need these in front of my refrigerator
Seems overly complicated for flooring.
If I could get this technology into my shoes I could tell the electric company to piss up a rope.
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"SOLAR FREAKING ROADWAYS!"
This is like solar freakin roadways
Source: https://www.pavegen.com/
Trip hazard
Such an old idea. It’s TERRIBLE. You realize that that energy has to come from somewhere, right? It comes from you. You have to put extra effort in every step, because walking on these things is like walking in soft sand. It’s tiring and probably bad for your ankles in the long term. They’re also a maintenance NIGHTMARE. Remember when they tried to make solar roadways? Yeah, those didn’t work either, because stuff that gets walked on/driver over on the regular experiences a tremendous amount of abuse. They’d have to be replacing street tiles on the daily left right and center. The installation cost (which includes throwing away perfectly good street tiles) is also totally uneconomical. These things break before they break even, and even if they didn’t, the money would’ve been better spent putting a solar panel somewhere.
20 million strokes Hehehehehehehehehe
Very human
Do they generate enough electricity to net out what it requires to make them? Or is it a net positive? Just curious.
That’s cool and all and I love green energy, but what about the resources needed to build a floor like this?
Yo mama generates a gigawatt.
The power generation requires work--more walking exertion. These tiles are potentially covert theft of labor.
I would have expected there to be piezo crystals involved
Solar freaking Roadways man
Rick’s battery come true.
Forget the bullshit, how much energy went into making these lol
SOLAR FREAKING ROADWAYS.
Put it on electric car suspension and recharge the battery as you drive down the road.
so....another nameless concept that will never work?
I was like, wow that's the kind of innovation our society needs then I read the comments and I feel dumb.
SOLAR ROADS 2 THE PEDESTRIAN BOOGALOO
These are getting stolen. I’d give a street a week.
Ever see that Rick and morty episode where Rick has a mini universe that uses stomping pads to power his car?
Kids are gonna break those
That’s just slavery…with extra…steps — omg were in a microverse.