Low-Tech Magazine: Human Powered Air Compressor and Energy Storage System
Low-Tech Magazine: Human Powered Air Compressor and Energy Storage System
Andy Lagzdins built and documented a pedal-powered air compressor to run the power tools in his motorcycle workshop.
I wonder how efficient it is. Let's say the bike is 90% efficient, the pump is 70% efficient and the pneumatic power tools are 70% efficient, so you get 44.1% efficiency.
If you give or take 10% from/to each of those, you can get as low as 28.8% efficient or as high as 64% efficient.
If you build the electic equivalent (generator, battery and electric powertools) it is probably twice as efficient or more. Pedal for only a half to a third as long.
9While this is true, I would also consider the stability of the system, the ease of repairing it, and the availability of components if necessary.
5Yeah it is pretty cool in that regard. I was just wondering how it compares and thought it might be interesting for others.
I would be cool to optionally hook up wind power up to it too. You can easily DIY one with more than 1000 kW peak power, which is athlete levels of output for a human.
Depending on your useage and size of tank, intermittency shouldn't be a problem, but if it is, you can always slap on the bike again.
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Adding to this: This is basically turning solar energy in stored energy. Solar power-> growing Plants-> Man eats Plants-> kinetic energy-> storage
Simply take a solar panel and a battery.
5You loose around 30% of energy from the sun through the atmosphere, plants are about 3% efficient at turning light into sugar, humans are about 25% efficient at turning food into mechanical energy, so you are only about 0.525% efficient at turning energy from the sun into human power on earth. So you this device is only about 0.231525% efficient at turning solar power into usable work.
Assuming 80% efficiency for the electric variant, 20% efficiency for solar panels, 90% efficiency for robots to turn electricity into mechanical work, that's 14.4% efficient. Then it's like 62.196307 times more efficient to become a solar electric android and pedal on it in space.
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Cool project, I bet they could augment the design to use wind or, if a flowing water source is near by, translate that mechanical energy into the system without having to resort to anything electronic. Might require more gearing.
That way you could pedal when you want and then engage the other mechanical source to "trickle charge" the system in your absence.
4Using belts instead of chains would also make sourcing all the parts much easier, like in ye olde steam powered workshops.
Efficiency isn't that big a deal anyway when you use abundant power like water or wind.
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