Oregon State University (OSU) and a private firm are teaming up to harness the energy of students' gym workouts to create power for charging laptops, iPods or even a small energy efficient house. OSU will become one of the first universities in the United States to tap the kinetic energy generated by people involved in daily workout routines and turn it into a form of renewable energy. Using a new technology developed by ReRev.com, LLC, OSU has retrofitted 22 elliptical exercise machines and is already collecting the power produced by students and feeding it back into the power grid.
The ReRev technology features a system that has a patent pending called ReCardio that captures and converts the otherwise counter-productive heat energy from exercise machines. Instead of creating heat as most exercise machines are set up to do, usable electricity will be generated.
"The center's workout volume, combined with the large amount of equipment, could eventually produce the same amount of electricity as a small solar photovoltaic system, placing students directly in the renewable energy production chain," said Brandon Trelstad, the university's sustainability coordinator.
When students are pedaling for power on these elliptical machines, a real-time display screen shows momentary power production, production to date, production peaks, and other information.
The Green Microgym, in Portland USA, is also turning human energy into electricity using the same concept and offers reward points for every hour spent on gym equipment using the powerless mode. At Green Microgym, electricity generated by stationary bikes flows into a bank of batteries, which, in turn, powers devices. Some stationary bikes have laptops built into them which are powered up once the user begins pedalling.
At Yale University a mechanism has been devised that harnesses the energy generated by a stationary exercise bike to charge small electronic devices. The PRECOR bike was retrofitted with new technology earlier this year and is a prototype for a project to harvest the energy of gym-goers to power parts of the gym itself.
Engineering Major Henrique Rocha who devised the Yale mechanism said "The general idea is that normally all the power generated is dumped in a load. Our approach is to extract the energy before it is dumped so that we can do something useful with it." According to Rocha's calculations, a regular exercise bike could produce enough power for a multitude of small electronic devices. "Our main goal is to raise energy awareness and to show that, little by little, things add up," he said.
Top Image: power harvesting exercise bike. Source: Talkibie
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