Imagine a time when the houses we live in are partially powered by our vehicles- sound crazy? Not exactly. The project I am proposing takes the average household garage and transforms it into a vehicle dependent power plant. Imagine entire communities producing power over night by their parked vehicles.Wind turbines and hydroelectric plants power our homes every day. The one quintessential element these generators take advantage of is natural force. How can a parked vehicle generate enough force to partially power a home? It can do so with its own weight. The project I am proposing takes the average household garage and transforms it into a vehicle dependent power plant. Imagine entire communities producing power over night by their parked vehicles.
Hey Mr. Bond,
Very much impressed with your concept and renderings. Great job, good luck.
May the Force be with You,
Simo
Congratulations – you have solved all the world’s energy problems! Couldn’t you just leave out the car and use a big stone or something. Wait, maybe you should read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion
Hi!
This is creative submission. It’s always tempting to take advantage of potential energy.
Unfortunately, I believe it’s the 2nd law of thermodynamics that’s working against you in this case. The maximum amount of energy one could harness from a mechanism like this is a function of the vehicle’s weight, its total vertical displacement, and the efficiency of the dynamo. Not to mention, it would take many times the amount of energy generated to get the car out of the pit the next time it was to be used.
Good luck in the future!
-Damian
This is impossible. Do you know how a see-saw works? The kids (or whoever is on it) have to PUT ENERGY IN to the system in order to make it move. Otherwise, the heavier child will just elevate the other and that is the end of the system.
So once you go into “unstable” mode, the engine end of the car dips down. How does it get back up? Through the use of hydraulics. Where does the power come from? I don’t know. Is it from the car dropping? If it is, then you should know that only in a perfect world can that drop generate enough power to level it back out. And frankly this is impossible in the real world.
Friction and energy conversion will easily make sure you don’t have enough juice to elevate the car again.
To be clear, this isn’t something that is hard. This is something that is impossible.
In short, nice drawing, but the laws of physics don’t bend to make this work.
Did anyone vet these?
This cannot work. Do some math. Learn some physics. Ugh.
Violating the Law of Conservation of Energy…
I like the idea, but I’m certain on the physics. I’m suspecting that very little excess energy will be produced by this system considering how much energy will go into the dampening and oscillation. There are also quite a host of things that could go wrong with the device, each of which have devastatingly expense/invasive side-effects. If if the physics work, I don’t see insurance companies or homeowners (especially parents) being willing to do this until it’s proven safe and reliable. Then there is the ROI length, just how long would it take to break even with this?
Sorry: *not certain on the physics*
Somebody needs to have paid attention in 8th grade physics class. If this worked, why not have two boulders (of slightly different weight?) in a shed out back generating power all the time? Or better yet, our power plants could be two huge boulders, or rows of them…see-sawing back and forth. An endless stream of clean, albeit heavy, energy.
Friction will slow the car down until it stops. And then you still will have to use energy to move the car back to “stable” mode. Otherwise you’d have created a perpetual motion machine.
Great presentation and renderings. This is well put forward.
The concept will not work for all of the previous stated reasons but keep trying. It will be the unorthodox thinkers that find solutions to consistent problems.
I highly recommend researching your concept before submitting next time.
If you want an example of a cool perpetual motion-like device, look up the Stirling engine first conceived in 1816.
Please go visit your high school physics teacher and learn about the class you missed of basic law of motion.
I think what #3 Damian is trying to say is that this guy just solved all our world’s energy problems iff we are willing to throw all of our cars into a very deep pit and never pull them back out. Sounds good to me!
eeesh. well, at least it would be nice to look at. garage floors are boring as they are.
there would be no appreciable energy generated by this.
In reference to the greater number of comments;
Alright, so the physics doesn’t work. So what. It’s an interesting idea that perhaps could be developed into something that does work down the track, who knows? There’s not need to be smarmy about it. Geeze. The guy gave it a shot, say something constructive.
don’t architects take physics in undergrad anymore?
gravitational potential energy is = mass x gravity acceleration x height difference.
for a 2000 kg car at 6 meter high (guess from the rendering) on earth (9.8 meter/sec/sec acceleration), this energy is about 117,000 newton-meter, or about 30 watt-hour. which mean the potential energy of the car could light a small light bulb for an hour or a tv for 5 minutes.
one way to make this work is: park the car on a spring-loaded elevator-platform, the weight of the car turns a system of gears to run a generator as the car slowly elevators down the 6 meter. drive the car up a ramp and around to the (re-elevated) platform to restart the cycle.
a human-auto treadmill to power a tv!! how perfect.
*a human-auto gas-powered treadmill to power a tv!!*
This idea is definately seductive, though an automobile is likely a poor choice.
I’m not overly familiar with thermodynamics etc, but for all the scientists out there, maybe you could explain a bit to me.
This idea doesn’t violate the The law of conservation of energy, because it’s utilizing the downward force of gravity, just like hyrdro-electric generators do.
I watched a video (and since used the ideas of leverage myself) where a gentleman made his own stonehenge by using simple levers to manipulate massive concrete blocks. He was able to teeter-totter these massive blocks back & forth on a fulcrum with a few 5 gallons buckets, each time placing wood undernearth and eventually raising the block horizontally 15 or 20 feet in the air.
I bring this up only to point out that if you have a perfectly balanced scale, it only takes a small incremental weight added to reverse the entire balance. When that weight is removed, it returns to it’s original position. The question is, if you had a large enough block (or auto) would it produce enough energy via gravity to offset the power cost of placing a much smaller weight on the opposing side and then removing it? And further more, instead of placing a weight and removing it on only one side to create this action, couldn’t you have a counterweight that was teeter-tottering via pulleys also? You are then further reducing the power required to operate that counterweight by the same factor required to affect the larger weight.
This idea utilizes the power of gravity and doesn’t violate the Law of Conservation of energy. Therefore the question is how large would this machine have to be and at what cost to build and maintain to produce a meaningful amount of power? How would it compare to say, the cost of hydroelectricity, an already proven technology.
sounds good to me !
I suppose if you entered the garage on a high side and drove out on a low side, like a walk out ranch, you would get past the ‘raise the car back up problem’.
A imaginative idea…keep thinking like this and drawing as you have done here.
Nice to see someone can still use a pencil, not some computer program.
This should not have been published. It can’t work! At least, it can’t work even close to well enough to justify building it.
@Chris Werner: The only way it works is if the car drops a little when it is parked. All of the energy that can be captured is lost as soon as the car drives up and out.
A thing tipping back and forth isn’t generating power, and if you harness the energy that it has as a pendulum or see-saw, you will SLOW it and eventually stop it from moving. You won’t be able to both keep it moving back and forth and still tap it for power.
I hate to be negative, so I’ll start off with the positives – the idea is very well presented and explained, it looks professional. I also like that it tries to help solve the energy problem using something that most people already have at home – that’s a good attitude to have when approaching sustainability, instead of reaching for far-out futuristic solutions.
However, sadly, it just won’t work – the only way the dead weight of a car (or water, or stones) could generate energy is if it ends up lower to the ground than when it started. Someone else here compared this to a hydroelectric generator – that’s a good example, but remember, the only reason hydroelectric systems generate electricity is because the water was already lifted up somewhere high in the form of rain-clouds, which is ultimately solar powered evaporation. Once water flows through the system you can’t pump it back uphill to generate more electricity – the act of pumping it back uphill would take more energy than you got from the original flow. The idea of pushing a car back up is the same, you will always use slightly more energy lifting the car than the car’s weight generates by falling.
The author himself makes an analogy to a see-saw, but remember a see-saw does not automatically swing – at some point both of the riders have to push, and ultimately the energy from that push came from the food they ate.
It’s always tempting to use natural forces for energy, but it’s important to trace that energy back and understand where it’s really coming from.
ain’t that cute?
bur it’s wrong!
This will never work. If the car would be perfectly balanced, it wouldn’t even move. In any other case, it would just lean in one position and remain that way in equilibrium.
@ Chris Werner: The difference between this perpetual machine (which would not work) and a hydroelectric generator (which obviously does work) is that a generator requires constant input from some source of power; in this case, continously flowing and falling water. Just as any cup of water will only fall (and generate electricity) once, a car lowering will only generate energy once. When it hits the bottom, it requires energy to move back up, and that pretty much cancels out any benefit you have, since you need *at least* the same amount of energy to reset the car to its original height. A hydroelectric generator doesn’t need to “reset” the water, since new water gets introduced from a spring, rain, etc.
Is this sorta like a pendulum clock winding itself?
The only way that this would even *remotely* work is if you drove up a ramp onto a high platform, which spins a generator as the car drops to the bottom.
But, you have to look at the problem and ask: where does the energy come from? In this case, it comes from the gasoline, which propels the car up the ramp. You would have managed to build an incredibly expensive and inefficient gasoline-powered generator.
For any “let’s generate free power!” idea, you NEED to ask “where does this energy come from?” If you can’t explain where the energy comes from, you should run it by someone who knows basic Physics before telling the world.
i’m curious as to how this became a finalist. there are many “well presented and explained” proposals that look “professional” in the notable entries section of this site, that manage to not be so intellectually lazy as to propose a perpetual motion machine.
entries like this are part of why we end up with bad design in the world at large, because “Design” with a capital D is often thought of as ineffective, ill considered, pie in the sky nonsense peddled by snake oil selling “creatives”. submissions that actually *violate the laws of physics* can’t do anything to help the public of large take Design seriously, so the public will listen to the businesspeople and engineers [and no one else] and go with the most cookie cutter design possible because at least it is “proven”.
paul, yes but as is shown in #16 quantitatively. let’s say you live in a split level house built in a cliff side and that you always arrive home on the high side of the garage and that the car is on a platform that elevators down to the low side through the night to generate power, you are STILL only going to get on the order of 30 to 100 watt-hour (depending on car wt, ht difference, efficiency).
a designer can’t just ‘design’ without being at the same time a physicist, engineer, geologist, sociologist, doctor, politician, anthropologist…
Great idea. We need more original and intelligent ideas like this.
Regarding energy waste. The energy is already being used to drive the car. We have that net loss today in millions of homes. I see this design as harnessing that previously wasted energy – NOT making this the most efficient generator in the world.
I’m surprised and disappointed in the venom some of the comments. I wonder what credentials those “physics professors” possess?
“a designer can’t just ‘design’ without being at the same time a physicist, engineer, geologist, sociologist, doctor, politician, anthropologist…”
i think they can still ‘just design’ without being any of those things, but they have to at least get the broad strokes right. it is fine that designers aren’t scientists, just so long as they aren’t pseudo-scientists.
“I see this design as harnessing that previously wasted energy – NOT making this the most efficient generator in the world.”
When the car is sitting there in the garage is about the only time it’s *not* using energy, whether you see cars as a waste or not. If there was some proposal to generate energy from the car’s motion when in use, then you might have something. (And there have been some ideas for that – such as drive-over ramps that produce enough electricity to power traffic signals and such.)
But a car just sitting there as a dead weight neither uses nor can generate any energy.
While this idea won’t work, there are two simple variations that might.
One is to build a platform in the garage, say 3 feet high. (assuming the car can still fit.) Then, when you pull in, you drive up a ramp onto the platform. The energy it takes to drive on to the platform isn’t much more that it would have taken to park on the flat to begin with, and then overnight, your car slowly lowers the platform with its weight. There is a gearing system under the platform that xfers the downforce on a spinning disc, attached to an electricity generating device.
The second variation is in a circular driveway. If the owner wants access to the car sooner, the push a button and the platform immediately lowers to ground level, forgoing the energy conversion. Using the car’s weight as it drives away to reset the platform can also save some of the energy that would have been used to reset it.
This is ridiculous. If I knew this, I would have proposed my manna raining machine.
Why is there no possibility for negative votes?
A stupid idea! It does not work, may be! And if it worked, it’s still a stupid plan. To base an energy producing system to the car, not a good idea. And a little bit expensive, it needs too much place. I really don’t understand, why this plan was publicated? Negative vote for it!
How did a perpetual motion machine make it into the final round!? For shame.
@FrancoB411 No, that wouldn’t work either. The extra “energy it takes to drive on to the platform” instead of a lower platform, by the laws of thermodynamics, must be greater than or equal to the energy one can extract from the change in elevation of the car. Overall, you waste energy (or just convert gasoline energy to electricity inefficiently).
Cute, but it breaks the laws of thermodynamics
For extra laughs, go look up “gravity powered airplane” on youtube
eric suh, i think @FrancoB411 knows the energy comes from the gasoline…and as was shown on #16 and #28, such a device, if built, can only generate trivial amount of energy because of thermodynamic 2nd law loss…much better if you don’t bother.
however, people’s need to game nature will not die: as seen in this built system:
http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/07/16/green-a-go-go-at-londons-first-eco-disco/
where you can save much more energy by staying home and not burn the calories in the first place.
everyone want to doing something to be ’sustainable’ but don’t want to learn the real knowledge necessary to understand the problem…and so ended up deluding themselves and wasting resources.
Obviously this won’t be able to generate usable energy, but I’m surprised at the general attitude in most of the comments. Why so rude and sarcastic?
How much energy (wasted) and $$$ has gone into this project already? Suggested reading Physics 101. Good drawing though and some entertainment value.
I love this entry! But then, I think it’s secretly mocking the sorts of impractical entries that rise to the top in competitions like this. I’m positive the submitter knew that this was a perpetual motion machine and all the implications thereof.
Enough has been said about this proposal’s downfalls.
It did inspire an idea in me though. I thought of the other heavy things that continually sit around. All house and building foundations are carrying a lot of mass. I wonder if, by using piezoelectric generators at points along or inside buildings’ foundations and taking advantage of natural vibrations, buildings and structures could generate enough cumulative energy to make it worthwhile to install.
I have a similar curiosity if the same principle could be applied to bridges and roads, or anything else that has regular vibrations or stresses applied to it.
Why all the complication?
You could easily use just the weight of the vehicle to push down on a hydraulic system which could power a turbine while letting the car lower to the lower level over night.
On another idea…. have many small flexible tubes across the driveway and street so that when a vehicle drives over it the force of air or liquid pushes several small turbines to recharge a power system.
Hilarious. A proud successor to Heath Robinson has been discovered.
Even if this design produced some small amount of energy by entering at a higher point than it exits, how long before the energy created even came close to matching the resources consumed to make this device? If this isn’t intended as a joke I’ll eat a see-saw.
corwyn, hahaha, at $0.10 per kilowatt-hour, using (#16) 30 watt-hr produced per cycle, you need 33 cycles to make $0.10 back. if the contraction cost $2,000, you need 660,000 cycles (or 1000 year if 2 cycle per day) to get you money back–not quite though, because you’d have paid all that and much more in equivalent gasoline cost to elevate the car every cycle.
sad fact is this is probably not a joke because people actually built similar devices (and be legitimized by site like inhabitat.com):
http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/07/16/green-a-go-go-at-londons-first-eco-disco/
I was wondering if I was crazy reading this, until I saw the comments. Yeah, bad idea if gravity is the input, but the whole rocking back and forth thing would generate power. So, you could only get energy from this if it was on a floating platform, or in a place with lots of earthquakes. Every day.
Will my car manufacturers warranty cover this?
This idea is almost similar of creating energy from nothingness or from a wheel that has partial disproportionate weight that continuously shifts to keep the wheel moving & thanx to gravity it will generate heat &hence energy, but that isnt possible due to too much of friction.
The problem with this idea is that this will bee able to power something….but that SOMETHING is not an entire house rather lets say just charge our cells, Until & unless we find an extremely smooth lubricant this thing whatever it is will create a lot of friction & most of due to it’s instability it will not be a very desirable to the owners who love their CAR’S INTERIORS.
Physically this weighing system will come to a pit stop after lts say JUST 2 Or 3 swings.
You crazy guys – the is the problem of suburbia – not the solution. Periurbanization produces Co2 trough increase of traffic.
It’s kind of shocking how many people think this idea has any validity to it, or that it even made it to this competition. Is our educational system that bad?
There is something in physics called conservation of energy. Shortly, energy can’t be created out of nothing and it can’t be destroyed, it can only be transferred. That disco-project is indeed totally plausible because it uses the energy of human motion, which comes from our internal combustion (metabolism). The analogy see-saw is wrong because a see-saw uses human energy in the same way. But the car can’t produce energy out of nothing. That cylinder drown there doesn’t do magic. It’s magnets and spirals are creating resistance when they are moved and by this way they suck power. The car can’t oscillate because most car’s center of gravity is not right at the middle so it would just lean in one side. Even if it’d be perfectly balanced, it would be in indifferent equilibrium and thus not even move.
As for the other “solutions” with cars descending from an upper level, remember that cars have to consume more gas in order to get to that higher level so we’d better burn that gas in a plant and get a better efficiency (a car engine has an efficiency of 25-30%).
As for the cars going over flexible tubes, that energy comes again from the cars engine, as going over bumps would cause the car to slightly change it’s center of gravity, thus consuming more gas.
Just stick to the conservation of energy and you’ll realize how stupid all these solutions are.
Wow, democracy is great and all, but somebody should have applied a reality filter to these contest submissions.
Great idea. How about mounting a small wind turbine on top of a car and driving it around to produce energy while we’re at it?
the most obvious application here (of cars to power dwellings) involves abandoning the silly perpetual motion stuff and looking closely at emission standards, thermodynamic efficiency of infernal combustion engines, and emerging carbon sequestering schemes. Given a larger alternator under the hood, or even under the floor, a heat exchanger and a carbon recapture system, you COULD run the lights and heat your apartment building off the fuel in your cars’ fuel tanks. Given that the emission standards of the future were the same for cars and power plants, and that the cars ran off CNG, and CNG gets cheap (that is the current messianic “we are saved!” hoopla, right? Someone is fantasizing that we still have hundreds of years of oilshale methane?) then the relative inefficiency of the energy distribution chain becomes the deciding factor between energy distribution and power schemes, after ROI is addressed. The proponents of widespread adoption of plug-in cars forget that the power grid is totally unprepared for those loads, and that electrical power distribution is lossy and heats the environment, not the dwelling. On the other hand, the ROI problem is NOT trivial. Cuz the alternator in your cars are very very wimpy: 35 amps at 15 volts doesn’t go very far when you are trying to run motors like the one in a dishwasher.
How about weight-sensitive electricity-generating pads on highways, roads, sidewalks, etc., that react to vehicles & people passing over them?
(I just asked vos Savant same question)
just dont expect the miles to come off if your running it in reverse. just ask cameron frye.
Fail
Oh my gosh. Wow.
Umm… except. Wow.
I find it depressing that the general public is not familiar with basic laws of physics. nothing about this is feasible, unless your car dropped to a lower elevation and never returned, in which case it would eventually be hundreds of feet deep in a hole and about as useful as this concept.