Human movement provides energy

People Finally Useful for Something

By Joshua S. Hill

Saturday, August 4, 2007

It's taken a long time in coming, but finally it turns out humans are good for something. James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk, graduate students at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, have designed a system that will allow for the movement of large crowds of humans to provide energy. Their plan took first place in the Japan-based Holcim Foundation's Sustainable Construction competition for 2007.

The theory is simple; the movement of masses of people can be translated into energy. The application is just as simple. But for the moment the application is small. An example is to employ a crowd farm technique at a train station like Boston's South Station railway terminal. A sub-flooring system that is made up of depressible blocks that are triggered by the force of a human's step would be installed beneath the main lobby. The blocks moving against one another would subsequently generate power through a principle known as dynamo, a device that creations energy of motion in to an electric current.

However as mentioned, this is a small scale operation for the moment, and definitely not feasible for home use. A single human step could only provide two 60W bulbs enough energy for a second. But when that is multiplied by the numbers that would filter through a station as large as Boston's South Station, that energy obviously increases dramatically.

The test case that Jusczyk and Graham built their study from, was a simple prototype stool that, when sat upon, caused a flywheel to spin which would then subsequently light up four LED's. "People tended to be delighted by sitting on the stool and would get up and down repeatedly," recalls Graham.

The difference that this new idea has over other similar techniques is that its greatest asset is the ability to be built into a new building, rather than be placed down as a mat of some sort. And though a mat may be the perfect way to generate power from a concert, it would not be as feasible for an office building or train station. That is where building the technology into a new structure comes in.

And though for the moment there is expensive testing to be done, in the future, this could very well be another method of producing electricity that does less harm to the environment.