Have you ever been caught yelling at your mobile phone because it ran out of battery? Did people ever go, “Tch, tch, yelling at it won’t get the battery back”? Well, you might now be able to turn around at those fools and laugh triumphantly, because that’s essentially what the good people at Seoul’s Sungkyunkwan University are working towards.
Of all the renewable energy sources available to us, sound is often the most ignored due to the relatively low power on offer. But this latest energy scavenging project could well see phones that re-charge themselves with the sound energy in your voice. The current prototype that has been built can convert the sound of your average mid-morning traffic (around 100 decibels) to 50 milli-volts of charge. While that isn’t much, it’s definitely a start, and the researchers are already looking to build on that by using better conducting wires to harness the maximum power possible out of sound energy. The concept is similar to that of an alternator using in a car, but obviously on a much smaller scale, with the help of nanotechnology.
This wouldn’t just be limited to talking either. The phones could also be charged using background noise, static, and music, which is quite really quite something. Sound energy is being taken more seriously off-late, with other projects that even use the sound of vehicles on highways to generate power.
Via: The Telegraph
