Agreed 115%. Anyone with even the most basic engineering or electrical knowledge knows intuitively that a system like this is simply harvesting energy at the expense of road users increased energy consumption. Think of it as a toll or tax on roads that would employ this technology.
@@stusue9733 Not at all. Anything above 100% just gives you a perpetual motion machine/free energy device. I've seen a ton of RU-vid tutorials on how to make these so they must be legit. Lol
and am amusing the faster the traffic the power it will make? I think I need reminding why speed bump where put on the road in the first place? the landing say plane? landing or something getting rid of energy eg speed landing would a good idea jet aircraft carriers use tow line that catches the planes as the land making landing area a lot shorter than without one?
@@dh2032the landing strip is long to allow the plane to slow down. Using a rope to slow it down would rip pieces off of it. Planes have to dump fuel for early landing because the mass could break off the wings.
Compression-absorbing boots for cows. I’ve calculated one cow walking across a pasture could generate 450-850 Wh per hoof. AND, if you cover the pasture in speed bumps it will double the energy output. Each cow will have blue lasers that coordinate cow movement to maximize power output.
@@supernova743 but sand pit is reusable, I fear brick wall is getting close to one use disposable trick. Unless we build it real thick. Also I think it would be easier to trick people to drive into pit than a wall. We need more grant money to rsearch this further.
To be clear, this device isn't capturing the energy from a vehicle slowing down - it *causes* that to happen, but doesn't capture that. The actual energy generated is coming from the vehicle compressing the speed bump, which would indeed be a tiny amount. So it does steal the energy from the car that's required to crest the bump and compress the hydraulic cylinder, but the energy that goes into slowing down *before* you get to the speed bump is either going to go into regen (for an electric car), or just get wasted (for ICE cars).
Doin' some math, gravitational potential energy for a 3 tonne vehicle moving down 10 centimeters is .. 2940 joules or 0.8 watt hours. You can run a microwave for 2 seconds for each passenger vehicle. Assuming perfect extraction, energy storage & AC conversion, you would need 60 cars to get their gravitational potential energy sucked out of them to cook a hot pocket
I get about 250 watt hours per mile in my Model 3. So driving over a single one of these gives as much energy as it takes to go an entire mile? Now I may not be the best at physics, but these bumps look considerably easier to drive over than to drive a mile, given that drag exists. If I drive over 5 of these, I get a whole kilowatt hour! So... It sounds like a perpetual motion machine. Just hook up some induction pad right after the bumps and we have infinite energy folks! We solved it! Maybe we can also put dynamos at stop lights and have cars rev while waiting for the light to change while we're at it.
you don't get it, they'll stop your car for 1 minute to run the wheels. sure it's an abrupt stop when you're driving 50mph and you get latched on the device but think about it, it's energy you paid for and not the city, it's only right they ste.. tax your battery in an inefficient neck breaking manner.
@@EEVblog They are probably doing some bad math combined with wishful thinking. E.g. Taking the maximum energy harvestable from a car then multiplying it by 2 (two sets of wheels per bump), then splitting a bump into two bumps so each wheel compresses one half-bump and multiplying again, then adding another bump in series and multiplying THAT... then going "But what if a car is a fully loaded VAN?" Also, any energy harvestable wouldn't come from speed reduction but from the weight of the vehicle - you can drive over a speed bump at full speed without it slowing you down. There's a speed bump I can see from my back window - people not minding the road (or their car) will go full speed over the bump. The bump doesn't stop the car. It is not a wall. DRIVER slows down the car to avoid getting a kick in the ass and to protect the car. These guys are also off in their calculation by the factor of shock absorbers - that's where the energy is already going when going over a bump. Yeah, sure, the spring in their harvesting speed bump will store energy when a car goes over it - but so will the shock absorber spring in the car, that was designed to minimize the effect of going over a bump. Also, rubber tires. I had a moron run over my foot which was already in the road. I was standing, looking right, being careful and all cause I was holding an umbrella and it was raining - he ran by me from the left. It felt no heavier than a regular sized moron stepping on my foot. It took me a split second to realize what happened as he just drove on down the street. He was moving fast enough that all I experienced was a fraction of the weight of the car for a fraction of a second. It hurt a bit but I just mentioned his mother and continued walking to school. Same happens with a speed bump. Only a fraction of the energy as weight gets transferred. And the faster the car goes, the less energy gets transferred. That's why people lose the grip of the road while going fast vs. going slow and why asphalt tends not to get depressions in the open road but will deform at traffic lights.
Has to be over a mile plastered with these bumps or something like this. Then you lose "only" a few km/h on each hit ;) Note: they didn't specify what "one system" means, how many bumps, modules etc... basically a marketing lie.
Real fun is this. Several years ago our municipality also wanted to "experiment" with energy harvesting road bumps. I did the math based on the vertical movement of the bump and the weight of a car. Results were the same: useless idea. So I wrote a letter with the math. Luckely they didn't invest money in this experiment.
It generates steady sustainable income for car repair services too. And, the more you car sits at a suspension repair - the less it drives on roads and less pollution. Combo!
Yeah, the only thing I could think of as he was explaining that energy cannot simply be created, only transferred, WS just the idea of how little that would matter to anyone wanting to employ these, since the added fuel required to continue at the same rate of speed comes out of my pocket, not theirs!
The one place this could potentially work (steep downhill roadways) is precisely where I don't want my ability to brake effectively being compromised by these things' reduced tire contact patches and the entire car bouncing up and down, loading and unloading the suspension.
harvesting energy from footsteps from people who are just trying to get through their day without getting too tired, forgetting that gyms have dozens of people in them working out and trying to give energy away
Is there a good way to do that? OK stationary bicycle or stepper/walker excercise devices are pretty obvious candidates. A treadmill is not... really unless it's gravity based?
@@SianaGearz You'd have to set it up so the runner was driving the treadmill belt, instead of the treadmill belt being spun under the runner. I'm not sure how practical this would be, but _maybe_ if you had some sort of shoulder-harness tether to stop the runner from moving forward, you could set up the treadmill belt to be basically free-spinning but connected to a flywheel (to preserve inertia and keep the belt movement semi-continuous) and a generator (to harvest energy). The bit I'm least sure about is how to set up the harness so that it doesn't interfere with natural running movement - I'd imagine the tether line would have to align with the runner's center of mass, at the least.
@@turolretar It _sounds_ dystopian, but I doubt any economically-realistic dystopia would mandate it, due to efficiency losses. The poor proletariat forced to work in "human energy production" would be consuming more food energy than the amount of electrical energy they'd be producing - you'd get much more efficient energy conversion by just setting food on fire directly. I think this only works in "dystopias" where even the underclass has a resource surplus, or in semi-dystopias (e.g. the real world) wherein you could get credit back on your gym membership fees from your energy production - making them cheaper or almost-free if you have the time and energy to work out regularly.
During my engineering degree, I stumbled on a newspaper article about "piezoelectric pavement", and submitted it for thoughts to my fellow students. My point was, "the energy comes from your lunch, and you'd be better off producing electricity on a bike with a dynamo generator". Amazingly, some of my fellows failed to see it was moronic, and said "well, the system can gain in efficiency so it won't rely on the walker's energy"... 🤦♂️
Humans don't generate that much energy. I already thought of a gym with a side-line in electricity generation. But it would only give enough power to run the lights.
@@vylbird8014 no, indeed, they don't, that was my whole point : bicycles with dynamo generators (which is a dumb idea once you really think about the little power it would generate) would be a much more intelligent thing compared to the "pavement generators"... which is saying something about the uselessness of the latter.
An average gym goer on a bike could maybe produce 100w for an hour. Trained amateur cyclists maybe 200w for an hour, but let's use 100w. So if you have a spin class of 15 people, that's 1500w/hr. A bit more than the lights for the room, but nowhere near covering the hvac.
This is the thing. If you just draw a basic diagram with arrows representing the downwards weight of the truck and horizontal push of the vehicle you get a diagonal line. You cannot extract energy from the weight of the truck as it will weigh the same and so the only other place is from the push/momentum. If you extract momentum then the truck slows down (needing energy to accelerate) which means it needs to use more energy (and gas/electric) to speed up.
@@dirkvornholt2507 I can't remember which, but at least one of the early tube lines in London did this too. Regenerative braking before there were power electronics.
I don't know why they don't target motorway braking zones primarily. Over in the UK they put down these big yellow stripes that shake the hell out of your wheels in braking zones. It's a place where energy is being wasted because you HAVE to slow down, they FORCE you to slow down with the bumpy stripes, so why not install this stuff at these points where the energy being recouped is actually energy that'll be legitimately wasted otherwise.
There is a quarry in Beil, Switzerland, this specific quarry is unusual, they load the ore into dumptrucks at the top and take it to the bottom. So they use the largest electric dump trucks, they drive off the batteries on the way up and recharge the batteries on the way down recovering enough energy they do not need to to ever plug these trucks into recharge. And this shows the rub, any location you could use this, an electric vehicle regen will be just as good if not better.
@@vorpalinferno9711 I really couldn't care less but it's taking away from his scientific content. Essentially 10/12 videos in the last 4 months dedicated to Musk drama is a bit ridiculous.
@@JJFX- Seeing that Elon has more influence than all these other scams put together while also selling the same vaporware, good, im glad he focuses mostly on that clown.
Reminds me of a stretch of concrete test highway I used to commute on. You don't use concrete for roadways where the ground freezes solid in winter because it just falls apart at the joints and needs to be patched... So driving on that stretch of road was miles of THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP..... it was especially horrible in a truck with a leaf spring suspension. I was so happy when they tore that up.
I like the "fist pump of excitement" you do in the air at 0:44 - it's fantastic how excited you are about humanities journey to net zero, and nice seeing you share your enthusiasm with your viewers. Keep up the good work Dave - you are an inspiration to us all... ;-)
The simplest way I can think of to build such a system would be to put a long gas filled bladder (nitrogen or just air) inside the whole length of the bump. When something drives over the bump, it compresses the bladder and pressurizes the gas. Add a couple a check valves and you now have a gas pump. Store the pressurized gas in a big tank and use the stored gas to power a small turbine or pneumatic engine. The tank can store up the gas from each pulse, allowing the turbine to run continuously, and by making the tank nice and big, each pulse won't change the pressure much, which will give more consistent (and thus more optimizable) performance for both the pump and the turbine. A hydraulic-pneumatic system could also be used, with the bump having hydraulic fluid inside which then operates a pneumatic pump close to the generator. The shorter run for the pneumatic circuit might increase performance or the switch to hydraulic for the bump might make the design more robust. It would take a lot of work to figure out if that would be worthwhile. Of course, it would only make sense to install these in places where you already want a speed bump, and I think it's very questionable if the system would produce enough power to be worth-while. My intuition is that it wouldn't even pay off the energy used for manufacturing and installation during its lifetime.
Assuming it works (on downwards hills), I would think it still will only be green if the energy it generates is worth more than the corban emitted from manufacturing, installing and maintaining the system as well, and I doubt that was ever considered.
I remember seeing something about this quite a while ago. If you look at it from the perspective of an engineer it's stupid, but remember, the person who puts in the speed bump isn't paying for the gas that is being wasted by slowing the vehicle with a speed bump. Speed bumps usually slow cars down by encouraging the person to use their brakes to slow down. If instead you had something that physically slowed the vehicle... more in the line of the slowing you get when you drive through a large puddle, then, because it was forcing the vehicle to slow rather than encouraging the vehicle to slow, you might get a better speed bump for safety, but energywise, yeah it's stupid. I could see it being useful on some long stretches for large trucks, not so much for generating electricity, but as a way to save their brakes a bit and prevent runaway.
Except they already have something for that: The jake brake. Problem is, people are too busy complaining about the noise of the jake brake to realize that it is a safety feature and should be able to be used anywhere regardless of the loudness. I would rather be woken up in the middle of the night by a straight piped peterbilt using his jake brake than for said straight piped peterbilt run through a minivan and two sedans and kill three families because he lit his brakes on fire trying to stop and there aren't any runaway ramps nearby.
I think they're claiming that if the system was constantly in use for an hour it would make 300wh of power. And it would be impossible to get a constant flow of cars that never stops. So what they actually mean is it will make
Looking at the energy figures are they really assuming it will _literally_ be the only thing to stop your car? For a 3000kg car 150Wh corresponds to a speed of 68kph while 300Wh corresponds to a speed of 96kph. The only other organizations that have "speed bumps" capable of extracting that amount of energy from a vehicle are NHTSA in the US and NCAP in Europe. I think we are going to need more cars!
This is going straight into my A level Physics lesson tomorrow for a discussion starter. Pretty certain my future automotive engineering student will be in hysterics. That small trial footage reminds me of the cobble test road they used a lot in top gear 🤣
Also Downhill will not make sense for Hybrid or elecrtic cars : the energy accumulatded by the system is stolen from the rigen system of the car... ( minus inefficency )
Einstein said, "Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another". This first law of thermodynamics which also known as Law of Conservation of Energy works in all sphere of life.
Their address at Level 18, 40 Bank Street E14 5NR is a servcorp virtual office. As you would expect for virtual offices, there are many companies registered there with a mixture of legitimate and fly-by-night operations.
The only place I could see this working is on highway offramps, but as you pointed out, people would get really annoyed at their cars bouncing around! Also, as EV's become more common this would have a negative impact on energy efficiency. It's way more efficient to recharge the EV battery with regen than it is to try to harvest it through speed bumps.
Ok, when you first said egen.... i didnt have the volume up very much to my american/southerner ears, and swore you said ejit with so much enthusiasm... laughed pretty hard and loud for a few seconds. Lol
In Brazil they have speed bumps on the roads like every quarter of a mile. That’s how they combat speeding mostly instead of cops patrolling for speeders. So in a place where they are doing that might make more sense.
Revolutionary idea for these guys, instead of taking the energy from the car, just go straight to the source, hook up an engine to a generator and that's going to solve our power needs, we could distribute these stations where it's feasible but also distributive to prevent losses and vary the generation based on demand and not need storage, could call these places power stations, probably more efficient motors than car engines but that's for r&d to work on.
another good to know ballpark number: 1 kWh is the potential energy of 1 ton lifted to the top of the Eiffeltower, at 300 m height, or using the 3 ton car from the advertisement it would be 100 m. So the 150 Wh would be corresponding to the 3 ton car dropping 15 m in height or 30 m for the 300 Wh.
9:39 Yeah, downhill, that's a great place to put these things! So we should do that in place where there are downhill runs and a need for electricity, like street lights, maybe local homes, something like that.
I think what they did with those calculations Is to state the energy stored in a traveling vehicle and "sold" it as energy that can be recovered. They forgot to mention, that recovering this energy would mean - stopping the vehicle complately. Or maybe they didn't forget. They just didn't know that :)
I am not a mechanical engineer but I guess one option would be a modified version of the mechanism used in single hand powered flashlights. The modification would be that unlike the flashlights which produce power when the pedal is pressed, the speed bumps would use some kind of ratchet to decouple the curved rack from the pinion when the car passes over and then when a spring would push back the rack it would spin up the pinion that's connected to a generator. However since they say they use a hydraulic system then it's probably a hydraulic piston that pushes liquid into a hydraulic accumulator which is then released into a hydraulic motor which powers a generator. I have no idea which of these methods would be more reliable.
8:00 A landing strip would probably be perfect, as the energy is clearly taken from somewhere, and you want to slow the plane down. Probably less good for planes trying to take off, though 😆 It could also be useful leading up to stop signs, as long as no people live nearby to complain about the extra sound pollution from the speed bumps.
Someday grandparents will tell their kids they walked to and from school uphill both ways. Soon nobody will finish the New York marathon. These things will replace the moguls in the Winter Olympics.
My dad is a power engineer and he says its a drop in the bucket. The C02. Says the biggest danger to the atmosphere is lawnmowers, unregulated mowers. He designed the scrubbes for most GE power turbines all over the world. He was hired by Italy to develop nuclear but Chernoyble sent us home. He is still working in nuclear.
You should do some traveling around the world. In Romania there is an extreme amount of speed bumps, every crazed parent request one to “protect” their child, in some suburbs there are roads with speed bumps every 100-200m, it is crazy
The whole problem with all these things is "or can be stored for later use" The public thinks that this will happen in the next 5 years without realising that we are out of options when it comes to storing, they will never improve to the level we need to do net zero.
Ya, when I had the idea as a kid the only place I could think of was the down ramps at multi story parkades. At least with that you don't have any real risk of dangerous loss of control with the vehicle, plus the loss of speed was a plus. With the adoption of electric regen it's going to be less and leas ideal now but that wasn't exactly a thing back then.
My assumption for the use case: Many parking lots in the US have loads of speed bumps. I had assumed that was their target placement until the discussion of "let's place them on major roadways." At that point, given the major prevalence of fossil fuel powered vehicles, it's just really inefficient oil powered generator.
For those curious, you would need to lower a 3 ton car 36.7m (120ft) straight down in order extract 300 Wh (1.08MJ) from it, assuming 100% efficiency. Based on their video, I'd estimate it to be closer to 20mm per bump, so with 6 of them (3 each side) your best case scenario is extracting just shy of 0.5 Wh per (very angry) car. So yeah, just another snake oil startup hitting all the green-washing buzzwords. You could maybe use it to let a carpark speedbump power its own warning LEDs, at least intermittently, if you really wanted to.
One plausible use-case I can think of (OK, maybe not so plausible!) is tolls, like for a bridge. They put these in the bridge and 'harness' energy from your car and sell it to the utility to pay for the bridge. Today, most newer bridge toll systems I see capture a picture of your license plates and send you a bill (unless you pay in advance). This system, on the other hand, would not require billing and on top of that the government wouldn't have to track you (yes, I know, they still would!). Anyway, just a thought. The numbers probably don't work out.
A valid use case for this technology could be powering a street light or vehicle access gate in a location where utility power doesn't reach. Entrance to a state park, etc. However it would only make sense if the vehicle directly benefits from the use of the power generated from it (access gate opens for park ranger vehicle, the energy from the ranger vehicle going over this device charges the battery that powers the gate) Even then, I'd consider solar or wind first, as they can collect energy over time and not just when a vehicle approaches.
we have speedbumps all over the place here (Denmark), but if we did replace them with these, what would be the initial cost, maintenance and how much would it generate to offset that cost.
compression of hydraulics. weight of car creates flow that could spin a flywheel. The car uses more energy to drive over pump than would be captured by system. Maybe better to harvest energy from hydraulic suspension system of a vehicle as it deals with the normal road bumps.
In Brisbane we have so many speed bumps. Even at the KFC drivethrough. At the Coles in Deception Bay they have four back to back. Here we will generate more power than the sun :)
ME here - probably the simplest and most efficient is straight to a linear coil/generator. Any intermediate mechanics will rob energy and introduce maintenance, costs, and weather challenges...the displacements would be small, so that might drive big coils. An intermediary year train could multiply displacement, but...yeah. The whole thing sucks. Better to just pave in piezoelectrics.
There is a reason that we don't put speed bumps at the bottom of hills: You don't want cars to pile up in start and go traffic on a hill if avodable, a speed bump at the bottom a hill will exasperate this problem substantially.
We should really be putting these things around all the industrial estates for when the burn-out connoisseurs in their vintage AU Falcons with welded diffs come out at night to paint their cryptic symbols. We could power Melbourne for a week in one night.
This reminds me of the science project that the kids next to me in gr. 10 did at the university science fair which was to stick a ridge line wind turbine on a car. Their excuse was that a lot of cars were boxy (at that time) so it wouldn’t make much difference in terms of fuel economy… I was pretty sure you’d be taking more energy out of the movement than you’d recover in electricity. My project was 3D TV, also impractical but did eventually come to market!
