Sounds good
June 6th 2007 07:38
Imagine if an orchestra, instead of just producing glorious sounds, could also produce electricity? Wouldn't that be a very 'green' approach to the world's need for power? Or imagine that every time you played music on an MP3 or CD player you could actually run the machine itself by the very sounds it was making.
A group of physicists led by Orest Symko, at Utah university, have gone one step further back, and have been working on a method of producing sound from heat, and then turning the sound into electricity. And the genius of it is that it's low maintenance, cost-effective, and easier to manage than other ways of producing electricity on a small scale.
Converting sound into electricity is already available technologically through piezoelectric devices. These are squeezed in response to the pressure caused by sound waves, and change that pressure into electrical currents. (The word 'piezo' means pressing or squeezing.)
Symko expects that in a couple of years the devices his team is working on could be used as an alternative to photovoltaic cells which convert sunlight into electricity, or as a way of cooling laptops and other computers which generate more heat as they become increasingly complex. There may even be ways of using the waste heat from nuclear plant cooling towers.
The project was originally funded by the US Army, which seems to put money into all manner of such projects in order to improve the Army's battlefield ability. However, the off-shoot of such research (as happened with the space race) is that improvements are made in a variety of daily living situations as well
A group of physicists led by Orest Symko, at Utah university, have gone one step further back, and have been working on a method of producing sound from heat, and then turning the sound into electricity. And the genius of it is that it's low maintenance, cost-effective, and easier to manage than other ways of producing electricity on a small scale.
Converting sound into electricity is already available technologically through piezoelectric devices. These are squeezed in response to the pressure caused by sound waves, and change that pressure into electrical currents. (The word 'piezo' means pressing or squeezing.)
Symko expects that in a couple of years the devices his team is working on could be used as an alternative to photovoltaic cells which convert sunlight into electricity, or as a way of cooling laptops and other computers which generate more heat as they become increasingly complex. There may even be ways of using the waste heat from nuclear plant cooling towers.
The project was originally funded by the US Army, which seems to put money into all manner of such projects in order to improve the Army's battlefield ability. However, the off-shoot of such research (as happened with the space race) is that improvements are made in a variety of daily living situations as well
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