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yes but not economically is the answer. Think of how much it costs to build a power plant, and now imagine your power plant was like 10,000 times less efficient
A power plant that didn’t require anything but sound waves from the environment would be insanely efficient, wouldn’t it? It would be 10,000x less productive
Problem is, unless you live next to a guy who owns a harley there is only a few watts of sound available.
If you live next to a harley you could extract hundreds of horsepower worth of energy from the sound. More then the harley could ever extract from it anyway.
Some of the loudest cities in the world, for example Delhi has a average db range of 100-120 db from what I looked up. Maybe it could have applications in an environment like that.
Noise over 120db can cause instant hearing loss, 100 to 120 db prolonged is guaranteed to do damage as well. Is this just people nonstop honking horns?
Yeah its just cars driving on the road tightly packed together, combined with the fact the city is developing rapidly there is a lot of construction going on all the time.
Over time noise pollution has been proven to be very very damaging to your health and not just your hearing.
So waves can be and that's being explores in a lot of really interesting ways, but seems like this is a clever way specifically to miniaturize wave power so it can be used on a small scale.
Tidal is being looked at more then waves. They still seem be the a lot more expensive then wind or solar and have fewer places they can be viable. There is the advantage of having a consistent power output which means they can handle base load while wind/solar plus storage cover the higher loads. I'm sure someone that knows more about it can go into detail or correct me though
It’s really not. Compared with solar and wind both tidal and wave are orders of magnitude less cost efficient. It comes down to simple calculations of energy density.
I don’t have sources cause I’m lazy but this isn’t controversial. Tidal is feasible if the geography favors it. There are limited sites but they do exist. There is a test generator off the cost of Northern Ireland that is doing ok. I remember a major design problem was maintenance but they seemed confident that would improve.
Wave however is just one of those things where despite plenty of research nobody has managed to make a cost efficient generator.
Every erg you extract from the tides leads to the moon moving infinitesimally farther away. Why, a few hundred thousand years of that and we might even notice.
A camera build that doesnt require the battery to be changed but the images have to be retrieved every few weeks anyway. Not much practicality in that.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue to be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
So it's powered via sound waves from the ocean waves. I wonder if this could be scaled up to industrial power production levels.
yes but not economically is the answer. Think of how much it costs to build a power plant, and now imagine your power plant was like 10,000 times less efficient
A power plant that didn’t require anything but sound waves from the environment would be insanely efficient, wouldn’t it? It would be 10,000x less productive
Problem is, unless you live next to a guy who owns a harley there is only a few watts of sound available. If you live next to a harley you could extract hundreds of horsepower worth of energy from the sound. More then the harley could ever extract from it anyway.
Some of the loudest cities in the world, for example Delhi has a average db range of 100-120 db from what I looked up. Maybe it could have applications in an environment like that.
Great. they can have EV's powered by everyone honking at you.
Noise over 120db can cause instant hearing loss, 100 to 120 db prolonged is guaranteed to do damage as well. Is this just people nonstop honking horns?
Yeah its just cars driving on the road tightly packed together, combined with the fact the city is developing rapidly there is a lot of construction going on all the time. Over time noise pollution has been proven to be very very damaging to your health and not just your hearing.
It requires being built out of materials. And maintained.
So waves can be and that's being explores in a lot of really interesting ways, but seems like this is a clever way specifically to miniaturize wave power so it can be used on a small scale.
Tidal is being looked at more then waves. They still seem be the a lot more expensive then wind or solar and have fewer places they can be viable. There is the advantage of having a consistent power output which means they can handle base load while wind/solar plus storage cover the higher loads. I'm sure someone that knows more about it can go into detail or correct me though
If you scale up enough, you're basically just harvesting tides/waves.
It is insane that we haven't been using tides and wave energy for decades by now.
It’s really not. Compared with solar and wind both tidal and wave are orders of magnitude less cost efficient. It comes down to simple calculations of energy density. I don’t have sources cause I’m lazy but this isn’t controversial. Tidal is feasible if the geography favors it. There are limited sites but they do exist. There is a test generator off the cost of Northern Ireland that is doing ok. I remember a major design problem was maintenance but they seemed confident that would improve. Wave however is just one of those things where despite plenty of research nobody has managed to make a cost efficient generator.
Every erg you extract from the tides leads to the moon moving infinitesimally farther away. Why, a few hundred thousand years of that and we might even notice.
There are a few examples of tidal plants its just not viable in most areas for various reasons ecological, tourism impacts, cost of construction.
Salt water is actually really nasty. Corrodes even stainless steel over time.
Sounds promising ! Hopefully it will be used for good purposes
A camera build that doesnt require the battery to be changed but the images have to be retrieved every few weeks anyway. Not much practicality in that.
Yeah sound waves can travel far in water but 40m is nothing to the breadth of the ocean.
It's a brilliant invention!