The amount is only one of three aspects to consider. The other two are the reliability and the costs of extraction. Both are much better than the circumstances of other renewable energy sources and I am not sure if the amount really is so small. The comparison to the Ewicon indicates that it might be enough.
“There is definitely energy contained in that sound,” [...] “But the density of the energy is very low, and there is no way to capture it all. You’d have to have obscenely loud, continuous noise for harvesting to be worthwhile.”
Our ears are very very sensitive. Sound also adheres to the inverse square-law which ends up meaning you need to be close the thing that's actually making the sound for it to be worthwhile. The emitter is vibrating itself and it would probably be better to skip the conversion to and from sound and just harness the vibrating thing directly. So we have ideas like capturing the kinetic energy of footsteps on floor, or similar.
I get it that it appears there's a lot of energy out there to harvest from "natural" sounds but it's super low energy over all, otherwise things would be ripping apart all the time.
The amount is only one of three aspects to consider. The other two are the reliability and the costs of extraction. Both are much better than the circumstances of other renewable energy sources and I am not sure if the amount really is so small. The comparison to the Ewicon indicates that it might be enough.
I quick search turned up this:
Our ears are very very sensitive. Sound also adheres to the inverse square-law which ends up meaning you need to be close the thing that's actually making the sound for it to be worthwhile. The emitter is vibrating itself and it would probably be better to skip the conversion to and from sound and just harness the vibrating thing directly. So we have ideas like capturing the kinetic energy of footsteps on floor, or similar.
I get it that it appears there's a lot of energy out there to harvest from "natural" sounds but it's super low energy over all, otherwise things would be ripping apart all the time.
That makes sense. Thanks for looking it up.