Up to this point, our team has focused on defining and
refining our problem statement using several analytical tools taught in the
lectures. Now that we have defined the problem to be solved as a way of generating renewable energy and
storing it in a way that can charge a mobile device at a mass music festival, we are beginning to look into different
methods for accomplishing this task and the feasibility of each.
What we’ve researched so far:
-Piezoelectrics
-Magnetic Induction
-Variable Capacitance Systems
Magnetic induction seems to be the only practical method we
can use, since the others would not serve practical for our application due to
the large amount of space required to capture the amount of energy needed to
charge a mobile device.
Comparing different harvesting methods, it was determined
that we have conducted a short experiment to check the amount of power that can
be harnessed from dancing rapidly, averaged over a time period of about a
minute. David used an application on his phone to log his acceleration in the
Cartesian directions, which were easily exported to a spreadsheet. Having an
average acceleration of 6.42 m/s2 in the y-direction, and the RMS
acceleration was 4.54 m/s2. David and I agreed for practicality that
the most we would want the moving mass of the magnet to be as 1/8 kg. We are
still working on taking into account other forces like gravity that will play
into the situation to obtain more insight about how much energy we can
physically harness from an accelerating body in a small space.
We will be meeting with Dr. John Luntz on Tuesday to further
discuss any experimental methods for harvesting kinetic energy, as well as
insight about the amount of energy that can be harnessed using a coil and
magnet.
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