Harvester could save millions of dollars in energy costs
while cutting CO2 emissions
Stony Brook University engineers have won a national award
for an innovative energy harvester that has the potential to save millions of
dollars in energy costs for railroads while reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
The team’s work, “Mechanical Motion Rectifier (MMR) based Railroad Energy
Harvester,” was awarded “Best Application of Energy Harvesting” at the Energy
Harvesting and Storage USA 2012 conference, held in Washington, DC on November
7-8, 2012.
The Stony Brook team, led by Professor Lei Zuo and two
graduate students Teng Lin and John Wang from the Department of Mechanical
Engineering and Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center, developed a new
type of energy harvester that converts the irregular, oscillatory motion of
train-induced rail track vibrations into regular, unidirectional motion, in the
same way that an electric voltage rectifier converts AC voltage into DC.