Low Cost Mini Device Harvests Electricity Produced by the Wind

Calendar October 13, 2022 | Posted by admin

Scientists from NTU Singapore, led by Professor Yang Yaowen, Associate Chair of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, have developed a low-cost device that can harness energy from wind as gentle as a light breeze and store it as electricity. When exposed to winds with a velocity as low as two metres per second (m/s), the device can produce a voltage of three volts and generate electricity power of up to 290 microwatts, which is sufficient to power a commercial sensor device and for it to also send the data to a mobile phone or a computer.

The light and durable device, called a wind harvester, also diverts any electricity that is not in use to a battery, where it can be stored to power devices in the absence of wind. The scientists say their invention has the potential to replace batteries in powering light emitting diode (LED) lights and structural health monitoring sensors. Those are used on urban structures, such as bridges and skyscrapers, to monitor their structural health, alerting engineers to issues such as instabilities or physical damage.

Measuring only 15 centimetres by 20 centimetres, the device can easily be mounted on the sides of buildings, and would be ideal for urban environments, such as Singaporean suburbs, where average wind speeds are less than 2.5 m/s, outside of thunderstorms.

Source: https://www.ntu.edu.sg/

Category Categories: Uncategorized  |  Tag Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Roboticists Discover alternative Physics

Calendar July 27, 2022 | Posted by admin

Energy, mass, velocity. These three variables make up Einstein‘s iconic equation E=MC2. But how did Einstein know about these concepts in the first place? A precursor step to understanding physics is identifying relevant variables. Without the concept of energy, mass, and velocity, not even Einstein could discover relativity. But can such variables be discovered automatically? Doing so could greatly accelerate scientific discovery. This is the question that researchers at Columbia Engineering posed to a new AI program. The program was designed to observe  through a , then try to search for the minimal set of fundamental variables that fully describe the observed dynamics. The study was published on July 25 in Nature Computational Science. The researchers began by feeding the system raw video footage of phenomena for which they already knew the answer. For example, they fed a video of a swinging double pendulum known to have exactly four “state variables”—the angle and of each of the two arms. After a few hours of analysis, the AI produced the answer: 4.7.

“We thought this answer was close enough,” said Hod Lipson, director of the Creative Machines Lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, where the work was primarily done. “Especially since all the AI had access to was raw video footage, without any knowledge of physics or geometry. But we wanted to know what the variables actually were, not just their number.”

The researchers then proceeded to visualize the actual variables that the program identified. Extracting the variables themselves was not easy, since the program cannot describe them in any intuitive way that would be understandable to humans. After some probing, it appeared that two of the variables the program chose loosely corresponded to the angles of the arms, but the other two remain a mystery.

“We tried correlating the other variables with anything and everything we could think of: angular and linear velocities, kinetic and , and various combinations of known quantities,” explained Boyuan Chen Ph.D., now an assistant professor at Duke University, who led the work. “But nothing seemed to match perfectly.” The team was confident that the AI had found a valid set of four variables, since it was making good predictions, “but we don’t yet understand the mathematical language it is speaking,” he explained.

Source: https://phys.org/

Category Categories: Uncategorized  |  Tag Tags: , , , , , , , ,