India will have surplus Energy from these, the raw material being nearly unlimited.
Scientists from Korea have turned the main ingredient of calamine lotion into a tiny material that converts sound waves into electricity. The research could lead to panels that can charge a cell phone from a conversation or provide a boost of energy to the nation’s electrical grid generated by the noise during rush hour traffic.
“Just as speakers transform electric signals into sound, the opposite process — of turning sound into a source of electrical power — is possible,” said Dr. Young Jun Park, a scientist at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, and Sang-Woo Kim, the two corresponding authors of a new article in the journal Advanced Materials.
“Sound power can be used for various novel applications including mobile phones that can be charged during conversations and sound-insulating walls near highways that generate electricity from the sound of passing vehicles,” the co-authors added.
Harvesting energy from phone calls and passing cars is based on materials known as piezoelectrics. When bent, a piezoelectric material turns that mechanical energy into electricity.
Charge from Dirt.
A team from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) is working on a microbial fuel cell-based charger – a mobile phone charging system that gets its power from microbes in the soil.
The project is being led by Dr. Aviva Presser Aiden, an affiliate of SEAS and a current student at Harvard Medical School. Her device incorporates a conductive surface, that harvests free electrons created by naturally-occurring soil microbes during the course of their metabolic processes. She has already used the technology to power LED lights in a lab for 14 months.
Once they’re ready to go, Aiden plans on distributing the chargers within a region of Sub-Saharan Africa, as part of a field study. Ultimately, however, she would like to see the local people being able to build their own, using readily-available materials such as window screens and soda cans. She believes that a complete device could be assembled from scratch in just a few minutes, at a cost of less than a dollar. It should be able to fully charge a phone within 24 hours.
http://news.discovery.com/tech/cell-phone-conversation-power.html
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