Do Traffic Turbines Actually Work?

we know how to harness the power of the wind with these giant windmills but what about if we could use the wind generated by cars on the road so what if we just take the same concept of windmills and make it on a smaller scale and put it on the freeway so when a car drives by it'll turn the little windmill would it work to see if we can generate power from the extra wind from vehicles on the road let's make ourselves a mini turbine to make an electric generator you just need two main components magnets and coils of wire so first I'll set these magnets alternating the North and South poles and then stick them to this disc then I'm going to place four coils of wire in these slots and twist the ends together so they're all electrically connected together then I'll hook the magnets on a stick that can spin in the center and then I'm going to curve these plastic sheets so it'll catch the wind and when it does it'll cause the magnets to spin and when the magnets spin it will make electricity flow through the wires and I can generate a voltage now I've hooked an LED on the wind turbine let's blow some air on it and see if it works it works look at the LED light up so I made my own little mini wind turbine now let's head out to the road and see if cars driving by can actually turn this okay let's see if we can get it to move [Music] and nothing's happening I'm pretty sure that it's too far away from the car so let's climb over the barrier and stick it right by the side of the road okay here we go wish me luck [Music] it's working look how much it turns when those big semis come by it's spinning really fast it's actually working way better than I thought it would I didn't think there'd be enough wind to actually turn this so we can definitely generate electricity just by using the wind from cars but there's a few problems that I can already tell by trying this the first problem we saw at the start to turn the generator it has to be pretty close to the cars and also the cars need to be going pretty fast if they're not going fast enough it won't turn the generator so that means you need High Speed cars right next to the turbine you can imagine that might be a little bit dangerous but that hasn't stopped a few companies from making these mini traffic turbines that can harvest the wind energy from traffic on the road but there could be another issue that we're forgetting the energy to turn these turbines are ultimately coming from the Cars themselves so we're not just getting free power but we're taking it from the cars the question is then is a traffic turbine actually making the cars less efficient well the goal of a turbine is to take fast moving air and take the kinetic energy from it and turn it into electricity in doing that it slows down the air so on a busy road all the cars are moving forward pushing air along with them but then these turbines slow that air down so the cars now have an extra resistance pushing against them so would there actually be a noticeable difference if there's a turbine on the side of the road well let's test it out in order to test this we need a way to ignore all other types of friction besides air resistance so I'm going to be using my superconductor levitating on a magnetic track so the only resistance that has felt is air resistance and I have the track tilted up on one end a little bit and I can let the superconductor go and it'll fall down the track and make it back up as far as it can and then fall back down if it doesn't make it all the way around kind of in a pendulum motion here then this red fan is going to simulate the air that's flowing from all the cars on the road continually pushing the air forward on the road then I'll have some large turbines on the side of the road that I can stick here or take them off when I want turn on our airflow so now we got a lot of traffic on the road and I'm going to start it up top here you can see because of that extra kick of air it barely gets around the track but now I'm going to set up my wind turbines and I'll start at the exact same spot on the track [Music] can't quite get around [Music] now take the turbines off start at the same spot and it can make it around that's because the air is bouncing off of those turbines and causing a little more air resistance for the superconductor and so it can't get back up around the track but as soon as I take those turbines off again and restart it at the same spot then it can make it around the track so there's definitely some extra resistance just by adding those turbines on the side of the track but the question is does this extra tiny little bit of resistance matter because you'll notice to simulate the turbines I just placed a plastic piece by the side of the road so that means it doesn't have to be a turbine it could be a tree or a post or a traffic barrier so the turbines wouldn't decrease efficiency of the traffic any more than anything on the side of the road even a person standing there so from this experiment we can tell that yes they do reduce the efficiency of the cars a tiny little bit but it's probably not enough to matter but the thing is to generate any significant amount of power you need a lot of these turbines like thousands and millions of them and not only would that be super expensive to install everywhere but also if these are everywhere on the side of the road then maybe that tiny little resistance that it adds might add up so for me I don't think I'll be investing in the future of traffic turbines what about you and thanks for watching another episode of the action lab I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't forget to subscribe to my channel if you haven't yet and we'll see you next time thank you

Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 498,959

Keywords: wind power, wind turbine, traffic turbine, the action lab, renewable energy sources

Id: W8Oc3Etev34

Length: 6min 17sec (377 seconds)

Published: Thu May 25 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Jer3bko]

This already is/was used for bus lanes. Can't remember wich city it was though.