Given the opportunity for yet more indiscriminate self-linking, which undoubtedly is a favorite past-time here on Pruned, we'll take it, even though CrowdFarm, an interesting, albeit less than original, proposal to “harvest the energy of human movement in urban settings” by James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk, has been rightly covered by just about everyone during our recent hiatus.
But firstly, in the press release linked to above, you'll read that “a Crowd Farm in Boston's South Station railway terminal would work like this: A responsive sub-flooring system made up of blocks that depress slightly under the force of human steps would be installed beneath the station's main lobby. The slippage of the blocks against one another as people walked would generate power through the principle of the dynamo, a device that converts the energy of motion into that of an electric current.”
And some incredible bits of number crunching: “One step, for instance, can power two 60W light bulbs for one second. But multiply that step by 28,527 and you have enough energy to power a moving train for one second. And if you multiply a single step by 84,162,203? Enough energy to power the launch of a space shuttle.”
We say incredible, because it sounds too good to be true (or perhaps not even good enough?). Did they, for instance, consider energy loss and storage? Will the amount of energy be even enough to offset the cost maintenance, let alone the initial cost? But in any case, we'd truly love to finally see a feasibility test of this technology.
And now to some awesomely indiscriminate self-linking.
Engineers at Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability in Darmstadt, Germany apparently have found a way to cancel out environmental noise using the very windows that normally amplify it.
According to Discovery Channel, “postage stamp-sized patches made of a ceramic called piezoelectric material, which behaves both like a sensor and vibration generator when shot with an electric charge” were embedded into test windows.
More from the article:
Wires running through the window link the stamp-sized patches to a computer controller and an amplifier. When a sound-generated vibration rattles the window, the piezoelectric patch senses it.
That data goes to the controller, which in turn delivers a specific electric charge back up to the patch, causing it to vibrate at a phase that ideally cancels out the sound vibrations.
In laboratory experiments, they were able to reduce noise of 90-100 decibels (the sound of a subway or power mower) by 50 percent.
Other technical and cost issues aside, we wonder if you could doubly reverse this. What would happen, for instance, if one were to embed these stamp-sized piezoelectric patches into Notre-Dame's new stained glass windows, and rather than canceling out incoming noises from outside, outbound noises from the altar and nave get amplified? Paris will burn, perhaps. Nevertheless, we do like the idea of cathedrals humming to the surrounding landscape with a Requiem mass or Haydn's Creation. We've always imagined how incredibly cool it would be to hear Pärt's Sarah was Ninety Years Old inside the cavern's of Hagia Sofia, and now wonder how it would be like for to hear its hypnotic drum beats echoing, like a muezzin's call to prayer, through the streets of Istanbul.
Of course, future applications will more likely involve rewiring your windows so that they can alert you of incoming X-ray hurricanes and to wage suburban audio warfares?
The winner and runners-up of Metropolis Magazine's 2007 Next Generation Design Competition have been announced, and two projects especially intrigued us.
One is Alberto Villarreal's BrightWalk, described as a “shoe that incorporates piezo-electric transducers and electroluminescent polymers to generate light while the user is walking or running.” Sounding less like something you would wave around at a rave ten years ago but nevertheless conceptually similar is Elizabeth Redmond's PowerLeap, which according to ArchNewsNow is a “piezoelectric urban flooring system that saves the energy used as people walk across it, and lights up the nighttime sidewalk.”
Firstly, apart from Villarreal's website, the press release from Metropolis Magazine, and the ArchNewsNow article, are we to understand that no other online sources describing these projects exist? Should we have attended the announcement event last week; buy the May issue (are all the runners-up given adequate description?); travel to the ICFF in New York; or wait months for the projects to make their way to Chicago for more than the seemingly cursory descriptions we've been able to collect?
Secondly, we were reminded of three things:
1) Here at Pruned, whenever one speaks of piezoelectricity, we will always be reminded first of Yusuke Obuchi's phenomenal Wave Garden.
The following is what we wrote last time:
Floating off the California coastline, the Wave Garden is a prototype for a dual-function power plant and public park, oscillating with the ocean waves and cycles of energy demand. It is designed to succeed the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant after its 40-year license expires in the year 2026.
As an alternative to nuclear and other conventional energy sources, the Wave Garden is an electric power plant that derives energy from the movement of ocean waves. Its piezo-electro membrane is a flexible electric generator, where bending the material or applying stress creates an electric charge. Conversely, applying electric current to the membranes causes it to deform.
Monday through Friday, it generates energy, but at the weekends, the Wave Garden changes into a public garden - thus changing from a space of production to one of recreation and consumption. At the weekends, selected areas lift above the surface of the ocean, acting as a ceiling under which boats approach the entrances.
2) Next was this Wiredarticle, published last year in August, wherein we read that one of the regional subdivisions of the national Japanese railway network, with the help of researchers from Keio University, “plans to embed piezo pads in the floor under the ticket gates. As people pass through, vibration and pressure on the pads is converted by piezo crystals into an electrical charge which can then be channeled to highly efficient power storage systems and provide clean, ecologically friendly power to parts of the station. Although the piezo current is apparently a small one, if enough passengers pass through (and bounce a bit as they do), quite respectable amounts of electricity can be accumulated.”
3) Lastly, the Sustainable Dance Club, whose dance floor will convert the kinetic energy of clubbers to power lights, acoustics, toilets, etc. A video by National Geographic and BBC World on the SDC is available on YouTube.
To extend all these ideas further — or rather to return back to Redmond's proposal — one could imagine an extensive array of piezoelectric pedestrian pathways coursing through the urban landscape. Every sidewalk, subway tunnels, promenades, entryways and throughways siphoning power from the crowd.
And if one wants to be more strategic and thus more efficient, simply document via time-lapse photography how people move, say, through the Zócalo in Mexico City, and then install the flexible piezo-electro pavers onto where pedestrians self-organize, resulting perhaps in a strikingly beautiful paving pattern.
Wave Garden by Yusuke Obuchi has been making the rounds in the exhibition circuit since it was first presented as a Master's thesis project at Princeton University's School of Architecture in 2002. Currently, it is part of the 2nd International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (see The Flood Begins). Whether utopian or whimsical or both, it is grounded on a deep understanding of real materials and systems that it transcends its utopian trappings. One could be beguiled into thinking that it might just work.
Floating off the California coastline, the Wave Garden is a prototype for a dual-function power plant and public park, oscillating with the ocean waves and cycles of energy demand. It is designed to succeed the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant after its 40-year license expires in the year 2026.
As an alternative to nuclear and other conventional energy sources, the Wave Garden is an electric power plant that derives energy from the movement of ocean waves. Its piezo-electro membrane is a flexible electric generator, where bending the material or applying stress creates an electric charge. Conversely, applying electric current to the membranes causes it to deform.
Monday through Friday, it generates energy, but at the weekends, the Wave Garden changes into a public garden - thus changing from a space of production to one of recreation and consumption. On weekends, selected areas lift above the surface of the ocean, acting as a ceiling under which boats approach the entrances.
The area dedicated to recreation during the weekends is inversely proportional to the energy consumed during the week. In this way, the public park acts as a visual indicator of energy consumption - the less energy used, the more area allocated to recreation.
Visitors gain access to the public garden via an elevator. They pass through the membrane, which allows them to observe the thinness of the Wave Garden's ground plane.
