Have you ever seen trees sway in the wind? Apart from it being rather soothing to watch, what if that action could actually be used to generate clean energy? Turns out that’s what engineers at Ohio State University are looking into. The engineers have suggested that maybe designing windmills to resemble trees and the way they move might not be such a bad idea.However this is just one aspect of their research. The idea is that by studying how energy can be generated by swaying motions, the theory can also be applied to the vibrations generated by buildings and bridges, and potentially converting those vibrations to energy as well.
According to Ryan Harne, director of the Laboratory of Sound and Vibration Research and who is also leading the project, “Buildings sway ever so slightly in the wind, bridges oscillate when we drive on them and car suspensions absorb bumps in the road. In fact, there’s a massive amount of kinetic energy associated with those motions that is otherwise lost. We want to recover and recycle some of that energy.”
It has also been suggested that the sensors used to monitor the soundness of a structure can also be used to detect vibrations and convert them into energy, thus allowing the sensors to power themselves. As to why this might be more favorable than say solar energy, Harne suggests that they could be used in smaller scale scenarios where solar panels might not be an option.
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