Electricity From Speed Breaker

There's lots of this Generating electricity from speed breakers | Science & Technology ... if you just take the time to search for it.

A half-baked idea if ever there was....

(This has been around since about 1980. There was a Science Digest article on it back then written by someone who didn't know the difference between a watt, a kilowatt, a watt-hour, and a kilowatt-hour.)

Sounds like you are talking about dynamic braking. It is a wonderful concept where you can recover some of the energy it took to accelerate a vehicle as it slows. The main problems I see is the storage of this energy and the losses converting back and forth. If a gasoline vehicle accelerates and takes X amount of energy you may recover a %X of that, converting it from chemical to kinetic and back to electric then back to kinetic you may loose up to 70% of your original energy. When you consider the amount of cost in building a device, then the added weight, your net return is quite low.

That being said, there are people working on these devices and using them. As I understand it the Toyota Prius uses dynamic braking to recover some electricity as it slows the car. I am working on one of my own ideas along this line also.

Drew

Speed bump. Speed bump. Not brakes. Not regenerative brakes.

No, this is generating electricity by using the energy of the speed bump's movement, as a vehicle moves over it, to produce electricity.

Get it, little generator in there. Every time the speed bump compresses you get 13 cents worth of electricity. In 20 years it'll pay for itself.

13¢?

The decimal point is at least one, probably two, and maybe three places off there. But then, arithmetic is all but unknown in greenie-land.

True, but I was leaning toward the assumption that the OP was just having difficulties expressing their idea.

Drew