"Free" energy from traffic, Constructis - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Sparks
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 18, 2019, 02:02:09 pm
content: Read the news this morning in my area and you may find a small article about a startup coming to town. An engineer had an idea sitting in traffic 30 years ago and now has developed a product to harness the "free" energy of cars driving over them. Clever idea in some areas, like their military gate barrier application which might be used in a temporary setup.The idea to put this where heavy traffic is slowing down however, I see this as flawed. With a steel plate top this is going to cause accidents. Already in an area where it rains every other day, gusts up to 30 kph are typical and winter temperatures can range from comfortable to subfreezing in under 24 hours, steel plates in the roadways already present constant danger to the overpopulated roads. Trying to slow down on a steel plate is just a disaster waiting to happen. Driving site to site has me on the road for 6 hours everyday. People will simply move over to avoid these bumps. Let's not get into the fact that local laws also have bicyclists on the main road as well (city roads, not the freeways).On their own website the energy claims vary so radically based on simulations. I may not be a mechanical engineer, but I do know there is no free energy. A vehicle driving over this will receive resistance while generating "1,100 Watts" for an instant. Assuming the vehicle is slowing down then I may accept it as recovered energy, but not when talking about installing it on freeways.My conclusion to this is that the man had an idea and sunk $250,000 and 30 years into making it reality. Maybe he was stuck in traffic and saw a car pull into a full service gas station and thought that little hose on the ground ringing a bell when a car rolls over it could generate electricity instead. All this work has resulted in a niche product which is now going to be tested in a city which just happens to have 10 million dollars to blow on environmental start-ups. I am interested to hear everyone else's thoughts on this project.https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/kinetic-roadways-moving-energy-forward#/https://pilotonline.com/news/local/environment/article_e7c43ca6-39e2-11e9-941b-e394adf3bc76.htmlhttps://constructisllc.com/

author: fourtytwo42
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 18, 2019, 07:09:49 pm
content: There's a special place for stuff like this, it's called the "dodgy technology" section, please put it there

author: george80
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 18, 2019, 09:27:00 pm
content: Wait or it....... W a i t f or it .......nctnico is going to be along any moment now telling us what a great idea it is and using that first link to prove it's scientifically creditable.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2019, 07:24:36 am
content: Quote from: Sparks on March 18, 2019, 02:02:09 pmThe 'inventor' should have invested money in getting a basic physics education and do some research. Then he would have known that his device tries to defeat the laws of physics where is comes to preservation of energy. Fourtytwo42 already wrote it: put it on dodgy technology. It is the millionth 'kinetic energy from the road to energy' device BTW.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 21, 2019, 08:15:01 am
content: Oh the hilarity, 1 intersection will produce 1.3MW a year, wow, wow, wow, ....... my house uses 2MW a year! And I don't thing futur owners of EV's that do regenerative breaking far better than this contraption will be happy to donate their cars energy source capacity in this way.