We walk here We go there, we go everywhere. Maybe you go to work or in lunch in a busy city. You spend energy and the exercise is good for you. But what if we could also recover everything that supplied energy freely and transform it into useful electricity?
This is a real thing. The systems were installed in dozens of countries. Check this movie. And why stop at it? You can put them in a disco and utilize this fancy leg work to power the strobe lights. Or build them in the Hopcotch playground. When you start thinking about it, the possibilities are unlimited.
But how does it work? How much power can he generate? Of course, one person would not matter much, but they will convert full pavements in Recent York, and you can have something. Could we put it all over the world and stop using fossil fuels? Let’s find out!
Follow the bouncing ball
First, we need a model of walking man. No sweat, right? Walking is so basic that a 1-year-old can do it. Well, in fact, two -legged transport 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 a wheelchair. So let’s start with something simpler: a bouncing ball.
Believe it or not, it is a pretty good analogy. We immediately see that there are three types of energy: kinetic energy, potential gravitational energy and spring potential energy.
Kinetic energy It is related to the movement of the object – the sooner it moves, the more he has kinetic energy. If you take the ball and drop it, he accelerates down, which means that his kinetic energy is growing. But where did this additional energy come from?
Answer: It is stored in the gravitational field. This is Gravitational potential energy. The amount depends on the strength of the field (G = 9.8 Newtons per kilogram on earth), mass of the object and how high above the ground is. When the ball falls, gravitational potential energy decreases and kinetic energy increases.
This is where you can see something very powerful. We call it Energy protection. This says that if we have a system without input or output energy – which is called a closed system – energy can change the form, but the total amount of energy remains constant.
Finally we have Potential energy spring. It is an energy stored in a elastic object when it is squeezed. When the ball hits the ground, it deforms and stops. If you had a quick camera, you would see that you would flatten for a split second, because kinetic energy is transformed into spring energy.
Then the ball reflects to regain its shape. The potential energy spring is converted back to kinetic energy in the opposite direction, and the trampoline ball up. Here’s what it looks like:
Animation: Rhett Allain