Question by the_eternal.soul: I need help regarding a physics project, of producing energy by speed breakers for street lights..?
It goes like this:
welding five-metre-long metal plates into the speed-breaker instead of the conventional bitumen-and-stone-chip rumble strip. The plates are movable and inclined with the help of a spring-loaded hydraulic system. The fulcrum-attached plates are pushed down when a vehicle moves over them and bounce back to original position as it passes.
When the vehicle moves over the inclined plates, it gains height resulting in increase in potential energy, which is wasted in a conventional rumble strip. When the plates come down, they crank a lever fitted to a ratchet-wheel type mechanism. This in turn rotates a geared shaft loaded with recoil springs. The output of this shaft is coupled to a dynamo to convert kinetic energy into electricity.
A vehicle weighing 1,000 kg going up a height of 10 cm on such a rumble strip produces approximately 0.98 kilowatt power. So one such speed-breaker on a busy highway, where about 100 vehicles pass every minute, about one kilo watt of electricity can be produced every single minute. A storage module like an inverter will have to be fitted to each such rumble strip to store this electricity.
Yeah..so can neone plz tell me how to make this on a small scale..n probably..an easier mechanism..?..thnks…!!
Best answer:
Answer by sr_engr
Personally, I think using the freeways as a thermal-solar collector might be a better option. Sunlight is a kilowatt per square meter no matter what traffic is like. We cover a huge portion of the earth with pavement (soaks up light re-radiates it as heat) so we might as well use some of that energy for human purposes.
1 mile of freeway that is 2 lanes in each direction, say 40 ft wide has
5280*40 square feet, or about 19,621 square meters. That means it typically has 19 megawatts of incident energy. If just over 10% were captured – thats 2 megawatts per mile. How many miles of freeways do you know of?
What do you think? Answer below!
