… Wearable Power Prize, Over-caffeinated, Ersatz Hurricane, Crowd Farm, Jet Beetle and MORE!

(A sort of sequel to Fred’s Kooky Energy)

Big Prizes for Little Power
The Pentagon is offering a $1 million top prize for a new breed of ultra-light electric power system that could be carried by gizmo-laden combat troops.

Your mission (should you choose to accept it): Design a battery that will produce 20 watts average electric power for four days straight with peak operation up to 200W. And it must weigh less than 4 kg. (8.8 lbs.). Also, it must be wearable by military personnel.

Following in the footsteps of other contests aimed at pushing the limits of innovation — including the Ansari X Prize for spaceflight, NASA’s Centennial Challenges and the Pentagon’s own DARPA Grand Challenge — the Wearable Power Prize competition was unveiled in June, registration opens in October, final notice of intent to compete is next June, and the prize competition will take place in fall 2008.

This latest Pentagon challenge is part of a series authorized by Congress last year to encourage innovations that would be valuable to the military. In this case, the innovation would ease a weighty burden: all the batteries that modern warfighters have to carry around with them to power their walkie-talkies, night-vision devices, GPS locators, etc., etc.

Second and third prizes are $500,000 and $250,000, respectively.

Coffee Power (It’s Not the Caffeine)
Based on a concept first invented by Robert Sterling in 1816, this is a working engine that uses the warmth of a cup of coffee (or tea or water) as its fuel. The twist: this little Sterling engine is made entirely of paper, a $30 kit that you construct out of thick cardboard connected together with tiny wires. Its two tiny pistons move a crankshaft that turns the wheel.

As noted by BoingBoing:

The principle is as ingenious as it is simple: In a sealed cylinder, heated from the underside, a piston pushes the enclosed air back and forth between the hot and the cold side. The air therefore expands out and compress together every cycle and that movement is converted via a moving piston and crankshaft into rotary motion.

The strangest thing about this mini-motor is its ability to work with cold liquids, too, because it is the difference in temperature that makes the pistons pump. After you give the flywheel a push, the engine keeps on going under its own power for an hour or more.

VIDEO

Foot Power
Two MIT grad students are designing a system to convert the mechanical energy of people moving around a building into electricity. Designed for a railway system, Tad Jusczyk and James Graham’s “Crowd Farm” would consist of a sub-floor that moves slightly as people walk across it. That motion would then be converted by a dynamo into current.

According to the MIT News Office:

A responsive sub-flooring system made up of blocks that depress slightly under the force of human steps would be installed beneath the station’s main lobby. The slippage of the blocks against one another as people walked would generate power through the principle of the dynamo, a device that converts the energy of motion into that of an electric current.

Although the electric current generated could be used for educational purposes, such as lighting up a sign about energy, the Crowd Farm is not intended for home use.

According to Graham and Jusczyk, a single human step can only power two 60W light bulbs for one flickering second. “But get a crowd in motion, multiply that single step by 28,527 steps, for example, and the result is enough energy to power a moving train for one second,” MIT News says.

Here Comes the Story of the (Mock) Hurricane
Researchers at the University of Florida have developed what they describe as the world’s largest portable hurricane wind and rain simulator.

Project leader Forrest Masters and a group of university researchers have created a 2,800 horsepower machine that can simulate a hurricane with rain and winds stronger than 100 mph. They recently completed the $500,000 simulator, which wind engineers at the university plan to use to blast vacant homes with winds of up to 130 mph — Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale — and high-pressure water jets that mimic wind-driven torrential rain

Mounted on a trailer, the industrial-sized behemoth is composed of eight 5-foot-tall industrial fans powered by four marine diesel engines that together produce 2,800 horsepower. To cool the engines, the system taps water from a 5,000-gallon tank aboard a truck that doubles as the simulator’s tow vehicle.

Wind engineering researcher Forrest Masters stands on a fully portable hurricane wind simulator.
Credit: Kristen Bartlett, Grace/University of Florida

The goal is to learn more about exactly how hurricanes damage homes and how to modify them to best prevent that damage, Masters, an assistant professor of civil and coastal engineering at UF, explained to Gainesville’s Local 6 News.

VW Probably Didn’t Have This in Mind
This street-legal jet car — a jet Beetle — has two engines: the production gasoline engine in the front driving the front wheels and the jet engine.

The engine is apparently a GE Model T58-8F. This is a helicopter turboshaft engine that was converted to a jet engine by some internal modifications and a custom tailpipe.

According to its maker, Ron Patrick:

With this project, I was able to use some stuff I learned while getting my fancy engineering degree (I have a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University) to design a street-legal jet car without the distraction of how other people have done it in the past — because no one has. I don’t know how fast the car will go and probably never will. The car was built to thrill me, not kill me.

via MMOABC by way of Fark

A Time Piece That’s Never Wrong — NEVER
Elevate Films provides the most accurate wristwatch ever invented. It is “precisely accurate in all time zones throughout the entire universe”:

Also, it’s unisex!

A timely reminder of the only moment that really matters — NOW.

Cheers.