We walk here, We want there, we walk everywhere. Maybe you went to work or for lunch in a busy town. Looking for Energy, and the exercise is good for you. But what if, on top of that, we could preserve all those freely delivered energy and turn it into useful electricity?
This is the right thing. The systems are installed in tens of countries. See this video. And why do you stop there? You could put them in discos and take advantage of that fantastic night work to attack strobes of light. Or build them in the Hopcotch Grids court. When you start thinking about it, the possibilities are endless.
But how does it work? And how much power can it generate? Obviously one person would not make a lot of difference, but they will turn the sidewalks of New York and maybe really had something. Can we put this in all around the world and stop using fossil fuels? Let’s find out!
Follow the spring ball
We need a walking model first. No sweat, isn’t it? Walking is so easy 1-year-old can do it. Well, in fact, bipedal locomotion is terribly complicated from the perspective of physics. Seriously, if you had to learn to walk from the Physics Model, you would still be in the hut. So let’s start with something simpler: a spring ball.
Believe it or not, this is a pretty good analogy. We can immediately see that there are three types of energy: kinetic energy, gravity potential energy and spring potential energy.
Kinetic energy It has to do with the movement of the building – it moves faster, it is more kinetic energy that has. If you take the ball and drop it, it will speed up down, which means that its kinetic energy is increasing. But where does that additional energy come from?
Answer: Store in gravitational field. This is Gravity potential energy. The amount depends on the strength of the field (g = 9.8 Newtons per kilogram on Earth), the mass of the facility and how high is above the ground. As a ball drop ball, gravity potential energy decreases and kinetic energy increases.
There you can see something very powerful. We call that Energy conservation. This says that if we have a system without any inputs or outputs – which is called an indoor system – energy can change the form, but the total amount of energy remains constant.
Finally, we have Spring potential energy. This energy is stored in an elastic facility when compressed. When the ball hits the earth, deforms and stops. If you had a high speed camera, you would see that it is flattened for a split second while kinetic energy is converted into spring energy.
Then the ball jumps to regain their shape. Spring potential energy turns back into kinetic energy in the opposite direction and the ball tramps upwards. Here’s what it looks like:
Animation: Rhett Allain
