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SONEA Converts Sound to Energy
That’s no boom box! That’s no ghetto blaster! That’s a Sonea unit! It’s basically a machine which protests the waste of perfectly good noise, converting it to energy we can use to do anything! Anything at all! But probably most often such things as lighting street lamps and such.
A single Sonea unit is 450mm by 450mm by 80mm, weighing in at a whole 7kg. It converts 30 watts of power per decibel of sound it intercepts. It’s made of Poly Carbonate elements, ABS, and other more obvious components listed in the layout picture below.
One airplane liftoff makes noise around 140dB. When taking off, the amount of energy [created with the SONEA] would be about 240kW. If we calculate with 500 airplanes per day, the amount of energy would be aproximately 120MW. If this amount of energy is generated for one year, it would be the same amount of energy that is generated by 8000tons of oil.
Humongoid possibilities. I’d lay one right outside my apartment window where sirens from the nearby fire brigade station let loose pretty darn often. Loudness for my free energy!
Designers: Jihoon Kim, Boyeon Kim, Myung-Suk Kim, and Da-Woon Chung
25 Comments »
Carl says
sounds too good to be true.
Gunnar Tveiten says
Is it an actual requirement for designers to be incapable of maths AND physics ?
The claim in this article is entirely implausible, capturing 30W from a surface that is about 0.2m^2 using a single db of sound, is not only implausible, it’s ridicolous.
If true, you could use 1% of the collected energy to produce sound (with a speaker, for example) and collect the remaining 99%, voila unlimitd amounts of free energy and perpetuum mobile.
The claim is so far out there, that even if you subsituted *milliwatt* for watt, I’d still not believe it without having seen the calculations.
Jeff says
That seems about right.
Almost all the concept designs here are impossible to implement; What’s the purpose of a concept you’ll never be able to pull off?
Stop your designing and go write a story.
Seriously, though, 30watts from one decibel is insane. Not only does this violate physics, and maths, it demonstrates a lack of basic knowledge about sound; an increase of 10 decibels is an increase of 10 times the sound intensity…
Lamah says
I might also add that a watt is not a unit of energy like the description seems to imply, it is a rate of energy consumption.
A Boeing 777 has two engines, each producing energy at a rate of 75MW, for a total of 150MW. Let’s consider a ridiculous assumption that all of that power goes into producing sound.
At a distance of 100 meters from the plane, that sound effectively ends up spread across the surface of a sphere with area 125,000 m^2. A Sonea has an active surface area of about 0.21 m^2. So, if it could convert incoming sound to stored energy with 100% efficiency, and we accept the ridiculous premise that all of the engine’s power output is sound, it still only captures 0.000168% of the power, or about 250W.
Devin says
in the early 1900s, who would’ve think Internet, cell phone would be possible?
who would have imagined we can send people into space just few decades before we did in the 60s?
CONCEPT DESIGNS sometimes may disregard the means of a futurist concept; they are tentative exploration that may have thousands of ways to achieve the final result
Klappstuhl says
You wanted Feedback, here it is: It doesn’t work.
Free says
internet, cell phones, and laptops do not violate laws in physics, they are electronic devices made available through miniaturization of existing electronics components. we can improve what we have and through that make progress, we do not just make concepts up and hope that one day it will be real. a concept is only good if its tangible, or else its no different from fantasy.
zippyflounder says
well said and well reasoned, conceptual designs should conform to known laws of physics or they show the designer n a poor light.
joe says
I believe what was being said is that if someone came up with the idea of the Internet or cell phone 50 or 100 years ago, they would have received much the same negative reaction. That’s because the existing electronic technology didn’t exist to make that happen, or to make it seem even remotely feasible. The same can be said of concepts like this one–it presents an idea to get others thinking in different ways. It isn’t necessarily possible by today’s means, but perhaps it’s worth exploring and will be viable one day in the near or distant future. That is the point of design, isn’t it? If you want tech that works out of the box, there’s plenty of places to find it.
Carl says
so lets all start listening to idiots..!
Dandruf says
You must be American!
Lamah says
This is not worth exploring. It doesn’t matter what you put into that magic box, it can’t produce more energy than what comes into it as sound, which is a pitiful trickle. That fact is not going to change.
Ram says
IMHO Wishful thinking and a Big Ask.
How does one collect Noise is my first question ?. Defies Physics and logic unless inventor can provide some mathematical proof. But then there is no real harm in dreaming is there ?
Looks cute though
stephen russell says
Way 2 Radical.
IF True, wow.
Imagine the energy created at Rock Concerts, Airports, Work sites, etc.
Huge use for.
Make it fixed & bigger for Airports.
Wow.
Noise 2 energy.
Must develop this Big Time
max says
how much is it!!!
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