Turn Sweat into Power-Grid Energy- is it Practical?

Workout cycle from PlugOut, a supplier of exercise equipment that turns your sweat into electricity.

The last time I was at the gym walking on the treadmill, I looked around and saw dozens of people sweating away, running, climbing stairs and pedaling bikes, all under the bright lights and cooling air conditioner breeze. And I thought, wouldn’t it be great to turn all this sweat energy into electricity that could power the gym and maybe return something to the grid?

We could turn gyms into power plants. You pay the gym and they sell your sweat-generated electricity to the power grid. I wasn’t  the first person to have this brilliant idea. There are now dozens of gyms around the US that have implemented this idea and a number of vendors who supply modifications to existing gym equipment that convert your sweat into electricity.

But, the value is not in the electricity generated, it’s in the idea behind it. Just put in the numbers.

You can buy from the Bicycle Sports Shop, among others, a sensor that will measure the power you expend in riding a bike. They offer a handy table with a few numbers for the typical power that a human can generate.

Two numbers are of interest. The peak power is the average power over a 1 minute interval of sprinting. The functional threshold is the average power that can be sustained over a 1 hour period. These are power per kilogram of body weight. You take your weight in pounds and divide by 2.2 to get your weight in kilograms.

Suppose you weight 220 pounds. This is 100 kg. A trained athlete can generate about 6 watts/kg x 100 ~ 600 watts over an hour. One of us mere mortals could generate about 200 watts, or about 0.2 kilowatts of power. For reference, this is about 1/4 horsepower.

Energy costs around the US vary but a reasonable starting place is about $0.1 per kW-hour, or 1 cent per 100 watt-hours of energy.

This means that a person working out might be able to generate about 200 watt-hours of energy in an hour of hard and steady workout at the value of 2 cents. If you have a room of 50 people all sweating for an hour, the value generated would be about $1.

This revenue stream is just not a viable business plan. However, if you had a choice between going to two different clubs, one that you just sweated at, and one at which you sweated, but knew that each drop of precious sweat generated some, even tiny amount of electricity that was put to good use, which club would you want to go to?

When competition between gyms becomes more fierce, small differentiators can be large deciding factors. I think the clubs that offer to turn your sweat into generated electricity will become more popular, even though the amount of electricity generated is trivial. It would be about enough to power the LCD screen of the TV you watch.

The ROI for a gym is not in the revenue generated by the electricity generated, but in the additional number of user who would be attracted to sign up if they knew their energy was being put to good use.

In addition, an exercise machine set up to generate electrical power is also instrumented to display the power generated. This is yet another metric that you can use for feedback to help you feel better about your workout.

And after all, isn’t a large part of working out about feeling better about yourself?

Electrical power generating gyms will not become the power plants of the Matrix anytime soon, but they will make you feel a little better.

A Moment of Tranquility in the Singapore Changi Airport

 

Experience an oasis of peace and calm communing with the butterflies, in the middle of one of the busiest airports in the world.

Fly High, Swim Deep

The signature line of Curt Hillfon, Swedish artist, 1943-

“Whatever you do, do it well,” Curt Hillfon told me. “If you are a bird, fly high. If you are a fish, swim deep.”

Could this be the Ideal Breakfast?

A bowl of instant oatmeal with a handful of blueberries could be one of the healthiest breakfasts to eat. It’s a great trade off between low calorie, filling, quick and easy and it’s probably pretty good for you.

 

University Astronomy 101 in Your Pocket

Now that you have discovered how much you love astronomy, do you regret not paying attention in your college classes, or kick yourself for not even taking an Astronomy class when you had the chance?

It’s not too late. In fact, you can listen and view Astronomy 101 classes from some of the top universities or listen to invited lectures by the scientists who are making the great discoveries we read about each day. Best of all, it’s completely free, and you can take it with you on your iPod or iPhone. A new world of learning is available to you at iTunesU.

All you need is a computer and internet access. Download Apple’s completely free iTunes program for the Mac or the PC. Go to the iTunes store and click on iTunesU listed on the left hand menu.

Smart Grid Presentation by Bill Parkhurst

On Thursdays, April 8, 2010, Bill Parkhurst of Cisco Systems, presented a talk on the Smart Grid at the Kansas City section of the IEEE in Overland Park, KS.

Fundamentally, Bill said, the Smart Grid is whatever Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, says it is. He has $4.5B available to fund Smart Grid programs. How this money is used will define what the Smart Grid becomes.

What Drives a Writer?

Somewhere along my travels, I heard the following story that captures the essence of what drives a writer.

The Vertical Wine Tasting at Stone Hill Winery

In a horizontal wine tasting, you sample different types of wines from different grapes, possibly from different wineries and from different years. You are sampling a shotgun variety of sometimes wildly varying textures, aromas and flavors in the hopes of uncovering a gem among rocks.

In a vertical tasting, you sample the same wine from the same grape and the same winery, but over different years. The only difference in the wine you taste is the year. This is a unique opportunity to experience how a specific wine ages and how the specific growing and harvesting conditions of each year affect the quality of the wine.

Gravitational Lensing in a Wine Glass

On May 20, 2009, Prof Patricia Burchat, the Chair of the Department of Physics at Stanford University, presented the last lecture in the 10th season of the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures. She gave what I have found to be the best demonstration of gravitational lensing.

Of course, there are many examples of gravitational lensing in Hubble photos of galaxies. These are sometimes called Einstein rings and are the direct result of the bending of light by gravitational fields.

Modern Cosmology was Founded on Luck

The Hubble Constant, which describes the velocity-distance relationship for galaxies, is the foundation of modern cosmology. It establishes the time and distance scale of the universe and the dynamic nature of the galaxies since the beginning of time. It is all the more remarkable that the original data Edwin Hubble took was flawed.

Last Man on the Moon Speaks at Linda Hall Library

Harrison Schmitt, the last man to walk on the moon, spoke to a full house at the Linda Hall Library on Sept 2, 2009, as part of the “To the Moon and to the Planets Beyond” lecture series.

Schmitt left the moon on December 14, 1972 as part of the Apollo 17 mission. He was the only geologist to visit the moon, receiving a PhD in Geology from Harvard. And as the only non military and non professional test pilot among the Apollo crews, much to the consternation of the NASA controllers on earth, he was prone to falling while hunting rocks on his moon walks. In this photo, his suit is covered in moon dust from his close up encounters.

The 212th AAS Mtg in St. Louis, MO, June 1-5

Three themes permeated many of the sessions at the recent American Astronomical Society meeting in St. Louis, MO June 1-5, 2008.

1. The International Year of Astronomy (IYA) 2009 is going to be a BIG, world wide event.
2. The number of excellent astronomy related web resources are growing faster than any single individual can track them, let alone take advantage of them.
3. Data flow from the new ground based and space based observatories is escalating and we are going to be inundated with new discovery announcements from now on.

Local Artist Finds His Artistic Calling

“It is so great to find your creative self at 40,” Keith Anderson says. In the last five years, he has taken what started as a Christmas present for his three-year old nephew and turned it into an art career.

Anderson has taken up the rare skill of creating paintings in paper. This is not the traditional painting with paints on paper. Rather, he uses colored paper pulp as the medium itself. His pieces range from landscapes to abstract modern art to impressionist style, each composed with delicately sculpted dyed paper pulp, dried and ironed into a sheet of raw paper.

Chief Meteorologist Brightens The Day of Local Women’s Group

“Ever since I was 5 years old, all I ever wanted to do was tell people about the weather,” Gary Lezak, Chief Meteorologist at KSHB Channel 41, in Kansas City, KS said today, April 3, 2001, in Kansas City. Listening to his unabated infectious enthusiasm for telling everybody about the weather, you would never guess he was shy and afraid of public speaking in college.

Have You Tested Your House for Radon?

It was 3 am. Jack Eaton and his wife, Karen, were asleep upstairs. They thought they were safe in their Olathe, KS  home, but a deadly killer crept through their house. It entered Jack’s basement office, waiting for him. But Jack, warned by his neighbor, was suspicious. He had left a trap the day before. That simple act might have saved Jack and his family from long-term harm.

Jack had set a Radon detector in his basement and it found four times the EPA recommended limit of Radon.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that 15,000 to 22,000 deaths from lung cancer, each year, are due to Radon in homes. Most of these deaths can be prevented with very simple techniques, if only residents have their homes tested for excessive levels of Radon.

Operation Impact Targets Traffic Violators

You’re late for class. You’re rushing down K10 at 80 miles per hour. The last thing you want to see in your rear view mirror are flashing red lights. But that’s the likely outcome if you are speeding during an Operation Impact.

Six to eight times a year, traffic police throughout the Johnson County area participate in an Operation Impact, a metro wide effort to catch traffic offenders, according to Captain Larry Jones of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office. These events are held randomly throughout the year, lasting four hours, just as often in the morning as the evening.

“During an operation impact, we typically write three times the number of tickets we normally would. We target tailgaters, road rage, reckless drivers and speeders.” Captain Jones said. “But two hours after we’re gone, the traffic is back the way it was.”

Many motorists who routinely travel the K10 corridor especially welcome focused targeting of speeders there. “Even when I’m doing 80 on K10, I get passed by crazies like I’m standing still,” said John Burden, computer aided design student at the College.

The Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) – Latest Eye in the Sky

We have all suffered through the limitations of viewing the stars from beneath the blanket of our thick atmosphere, especially thickened by summer humidity here in Kansas.

While ground based optical observations suffer from dust and small atmospheric fluctuations, some wavelengths are just not possible to view due to absorption by water vapor and other gases. Space based telescopes, orbiting above the limitations of the atmosphere, have literally opened our eyes to higher resolution and extended our viewing to higher and lower wavelengths.

With its successful launch on June 11, 2008, GLAST, the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope, became our latest eye in the sky. It extends our frequency range into the highest energy yet, from 10 keV to 300 GeV.

Engineer Has New Insight on Power Lines and Cancer Link

“There is a suspected correlation to 60 Hz electric fields from power lines and leukemia in children,” Dr Robert Ashley, a retired electrical engineering professor told a meeting of the IEEE on Monday, October 16, 2000 in Overland Park, KS.

Ashley, a former professor at the University of Kansas at Lawrence and University of Colorado at Denver, now retired, has spent most of the last 10 years investigating the power line and cancer connection. He addressed a lunchtime audience of the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineering (IEEE) at the Wyndham Garden Hotel in Overland Park.

The first epidemiological study to show a weak but positive link between overhead high voltage power lines and heath risks was reported by Wertheimer and Leeper in 1979, Ashley said.

Reviewing data taken in the Denver area, they found a three times higher rate of cancer death for children living near power lines compared to living in random locations. From this analysis, they concluded a possible link between magnetic fields and health risks.

Since then, though hundreds of similar studies have been conducted, searching for a link between magnetic fields from power lines and increased health risks, only one other study, conducted in Sweden, has shown any other positive correlation. Ashley thinks he knows why.

“Every study conducted, has tried to correlate health risks to the magnetic fields from the power lines. There is no correlation to any magnetic field effect, because it’s the electric field!” Ashley said.

Science Fiction Convention has Other Worldly Theme

Take 5,000 science fiction fans, 100 famous authors, artists, publishers and editors, 300 dealers of science fiction and fantasy books and memorabilia, mix in too many parties and not enough sleep and stir for five days. What you get is the 58th World Science Fiction Convention, or ChiCon, held in Chicago, Ill on August 31 to Sept 4, 2000.

This is not a Star Trek Convention. Amongst all the fans at ChiCon, not a single Star Trek TV personality could be seen. "This is a literary convention," said Herbert McCaullan, owner of Starbase Atlanta, one of the dealers. "If it’s not a book without pictures, it’s not SF to most of these fans.

That’s not to say fans at ChiCon are dull and boring bookworms.

In addition to over a hundred seminars and panel presentations, ranging from “The Latest Results from the Hubble Telescope” to “Are Comic Book Plots Real Literature?”, a highlight of WorldCon is the announcement of the Hugo award winners, the most prestigious award in the Science Fiction genre.

MIT Professor John King Honored by Students, Peers

MIT Professor Emeritus John G. King (SB 1950, PhD), experimental physicist and pioneer in atomic clocks, fundamental physics experiments and physics education, was honored by more than 60 colleagues and former students on April 1, 2000 in Cambridge, MA.

The leader of the Molecular Beams Lab at MIT for almost 50 years, Professor King’s reach has extended not only to his many undergraduate and graduate students, but to many others who have experienced Project Lab, Corridor Lab and take-home physics experiment kits. "Fundamentally, I had a hell of a good time and lots of fun," he said in summarizing his MIT career.Several former students reminisced about their enjoyment and satisfaction in learning from Professor King, a longtime advocate of training students in the fine art of experimental physics. Fred Dylla (SB 1971, PhD) recalled "getting your hands dirty and being surrounded by brilliant students who were around all the time" in the Molecular Beams Labs run by Professor King, whose teaching philosophy was that "the best way to understand your apparatus is to build it."