Japanese heavyweights are throwing their car keys into a bowl and pairing off to come up with a way to create and commercialise sensors and switches that generate their own power.
The idea is that the parts will make external power sources redundant - because they can convert energy from body heat, light and vibrations straight into electricity. Self powered electronics have already sporadically been used in technology like wall-mount remote control units for air conditioners, says Nikkei, but existing parts are bulky and cost a couple thousand yen a piece. 3,000 yen is about $35 - which means they're not the best bet, financially, yet.
An argument is that a single fancy car has 150 sensors in it. If all these were generating their own power and linked together, they would make the car more lightweight, reduce manufacturing cost, be more eco-friendly and together would be able to generate enough power to last over a kilometre.
Other bits and pieces where the self powered sensors could be used are boilers and, er, pacemakers. If something requires a battery that's difficult to change, the sensors would be ideal as they'll keep the pacemaker ticking instead of the user dropping dead because he's not a surgeon or there aren't enough AAAs in the house.
The market for self powered parts has been touted to reach $4.4 billion by 2020, making it big big business. All companies involved are under an umbrella consortium built by an NTT lab. Toyota and Panasonic are just some of the 20 companies involved.
No they woulnd't. They'd bulk up the car and increase its weight by at least twofold.
While I think that scraping up tidbits of energy where it would otherwise be wasted isn't a bad idea at all, in fact it's a very good idea, it's always a tradeoff. It never is a silver bullet, which is how it is represented here. Too high expectations means inevitable disappointment and probably the end of a promising technology improvement. And that'd be a right pity.
Sensors are of necessity small as they must minimise how much they interfere with what they measure. So by very definition they can only contribute so much, or rather, so little. Yet the overall efficiency of the average fancy car is something like one third tops, more like a quarter for petrol, meaning that only two thirds to three fourths of the energy "liberated" does anything useful. That's a huge potential for improving energy efficiency right there. But you can't really get at it through the sensors.
Oh, and Peter Chan, people get pacemakers because their hearts can no longer keep pace themselves, often because they start to wear out. If pacemakers can be made to run on so little energy that harvesting a tiny little bit from ``the environment'' is enough, then that's fine, but it's certainly not an automatic free lunch.
And of course it's not a perpetual motion machine because not more energy comes out than gets put into it. Even old people need to eat. Yes, I'm being pedantic today. Why do you ask?
Pacemakers are not a battery to the pumping of the heart. Pacemakers merely provide a rhythmic stabilizing signal or kick to the heart so the heart can beat to a stable rhythm. It does not provide the heart with the POWER to BEAT! That is a common myth among those who don't really understand how a pacemaker works. It is perfectly viable for the heart to provide power back to the pacemaker to charge it up.