Sunday, 25 December 2011

Power your own car/city


Normally, when we are asked to picture a vehicle for personal use, we are quick to assume that it would have an engine, 4 wheels, … etc.

I set out to wonder whether the energy spent to turn car wheels, to convert back to another type of energy to be sent back to the same car and again be used to turn the wheel. One way of going about this is to have 2 wheels to drive the vehicle around while there are other wheels rotating a generator or any energy storing device to regain back the energy spent in moving the vehicle. Below are some of the solutions to doing that. The main wheels are the front and back wheel, while the middle wheels are attached to any energy storing device
 

 
Idea 1: Coiled-up toy
This is just to wind-up a spring, and when the spring has woven to a certain tension, a mechanism releases the sprig when needed to propel the vehicle forward, hence reducing the load/energy expenditure on the main wheels.

  
To move in the reverse direction, a gear would be inserted in the middle of the spring and the wheel to reverse rotation

 
Idea 2: Road absorb energy to light the city
 To have these under the road so that when car move over it, the car’s weight would push the piston down hence turning the below wheel and since it is a gear, it would push the next piston up for the car to push that down too and this goes on forever. The energy push to turn the wheel of the piston would provide enough electricity to be channelled to the power grid or to light-up traffic lights. This does not depend on the weather, and maybe, high traffic flow in cities might be a curse for the city after all.


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