Feb 25, 2010

Waste Energy Generators HACKaDay - Much love

HackAday brings us another awesome 'EcoHack'
Looks a lot like the one I installed in my sons room for lighting (via heating duct ;-)

[Peter Wirasnik] has been casting his own aluminum heat sinks. He's working on capturing the heat from a car's exhaust system and turning it into electricity, kind of like the candle generator. In the photo above a standard heat sink is bolted to one side of a Peltier cooler with [Peter's] own casting on the bottom. That casting will connect to the exhaust pipe and transfer heat to the Peltier while the other heat sink keeps the opposite side relatively cool. What results is a voltage between 600mV and 1V. Please read, credit and spread the love from hackaday


Also see Energy recycling prosthetic foot:

At first, we thought that this energy recycling prosthetic foot was going to be a power generating device to harvest some energy using our weight in the heel compression. Actually, it is showing off a fancy micro controller based system for reproducing our naturally springy step.


These guys even hacked the "Steorn Orbo"

Reader [Hjhndr] ran across an interesting set of tests and wanted to know if they're brilliant or just a load of bull. We're not making the call on that, but the tests on a Steorn Orb motor replica are worth looking at.Keep in mind, people used to think the earth was flat and scientists of the time would have sworn up and down that's the way things were.

The Steorn Orbo is a motor that generates more power than is put into it. At least according to Steorn Limited that's what it does. An independent panel of scientists said otherwise a few years back but that didn't stop the company from showing off the concept a few more times, most recently a showing in Dublin ended this month.

So anyway, [Jean-Louis Naudin] took what he saw from those demonstrations and built a replica. He's made several papers about the principle as well as his testing available online. There's a lot of math, a little bit of smoke and mirrors, and several videos.  Take a look and let us know what you think in the comments