Grad student invents gravity lamp

think about the amount of effort you put into a windup radio or flashlight. 60 seconds of winding for 10 minutes to an hour of light (mechanical rotary motion) vs four hours of light for a simple bend and lift (potential energy transfer). So no, the lamp does not extract energy directly from the earths gravity field, but it is still "gravity powered". It is really just a name, I mean, does a lava lamp really have lava in it.

Also, the lamp was created as part of a Master's Thesis, not as the Master's Thesis. The Thesis could have been regarding a novel and efficient way to convert linear motion into electrical energy. I bet you could get a PhD for that in the EU.

dgbeach and nilbud, don't be such haters; he doesn't claim the energy comes from gravity (just the electricity generated does) nor does the article imply you can get a Masters degree for making a lamp. I think it's a novel idea and worthy of note.

"he doesn't claim the energy comes from gravity (just the electricity generated does)"

Who let an engineer in here?

The real credit goes to the people who have developed the new generation of LED technology that has such high output and efficiency. That said, this inventor has created a novel product from existing technology; one that has extraordinary possibilities for deployment in underdeveloped countries. It seems that very low cost versions of this could be used to bring light to villages with no electrical infrastructure. Remember, the cotton gin was a revolutionary invention made from such mundane materials that the patent was futile. Brilliant engineering can be found in many such inventions that leave us all smacking our foreheads saying, "Duh! why didn't someone (like me) think of that years ago?!"

I agree EAC. I doubt many people will have these things in their homes, but if they can be made cheap enough it would be great for out of the way places without their own electrical grids.

Things like camping trips, emergency lights during the extremely long power outages that sometimes accompany natural disasters like earthquakes or freezing rain (LEDs don't burn out, and it doesn't have batteries, which have expiry dates and need to be replaced every few years even if they are just sitting in storage, and those power outages can last for up two a couple months, even in developed countries. Just look at New Orleans or Quebec a few years ago), out of the way villages in third world countries, etc.

This makes a great replacement for those awful handcranks. I can't stand those things.

I'm just wondering how much energy it is necessary to spend for powering up the lamp. 600 lumens ~ 40w, if this is neon lamp, lets assume that it takes 40/5 =8w. 8w*4h=32WH or 115200WSec. From the other side we need to spend the same amout of mechanical energy. M*G*H, Where M - mass, G=9.8, H-high=1.5m. So M=115200/9.8*1.5=6530,6kg. It is about 6.5t or more than 13000 pounds. Even if the lamp is 100 times better than the neon lamp, - anyway, weight should be 130 pounds, -(without any energy losses), - is it possible?

They are recently developed low energy-usage LEDs mandarin.

i doubt its patentable, basics are common knowledge with loads of prior art

What will he come up with next a "gravity powered" watch maybe.

All being said, I DO think it is a very novel approach to produce electricity...as would be a goldfish with a harness, turning a generator wheel, while trying to get away from a picture of a shark :)

Sounds cool, I'd buy one if looked nice.

The real credit goes to the people who have developed the new generation of LED technology that has such high output and efficiency. That said, this inventor has created a novel product from existing technology; one that has extraordinary possibilities for deployment in underdeveloped countries. It seems that very low cost versions of this could be used to bring light to villages with no electrical infrastructure. Remember, the cotton gin was a revolutionary invention made from such mundane materials that the patent was futile. Brilliant engineering can be found in many such inventions that leave us all smacking our foreheads saying, "Duh! why didn't someone (like me) think of that years ago?!"

very insightful. the dramatic future changes we see will be a result of both finding new sources of local and ambient power, and applying them to suppply technology that has drastically lower power consumption needs........
just imagine that one day you may be able to heat an entire room for a day with a half an hour of spinning a bicycle.

The gravia lamp does not work.

From the CRC reference book:

1 watt = 680 lumens is the maximum effeciency possible for production of light energy.
Assuming the gravia lamp operates at one watt to produce the claimed 600 - 800 lumens makes for an estamate of how long the lamp can operate. Placing 25 Kilograms of mass at the top and having it fall through a distance of 1.5 meters makes less than 400 joules of energy. here is the calculation:

mass * acceleration * distance
= 25kg * 9.8m/sec^2 * 1.5 meters

This would allow the lamp to run for less than 400 seconds or about 6 to 7 minutes.

the claim that the lamp would run for 4 hours is a fraud.

The comment about gravity vs wind up technology is interesting. I wonder how well this sort of thing would scale up.

You could imagine a village in the third world with a large version of one of these masses, hoisted up to the top by several strong men and utilising pulleys to give a mechancal advantage.

Perhaps it could be used to light the village for the evening? Or maybe power the music system?

Some quantitative figures on devices that can run at low power would be interesting

Having read the Masters Thesis paper (which is very pretty), from which the Gravia Lamp concept was born, I have to question whether the architectural degree was awarded for artistic design qualifications rather than engineering design qualifications. Maybe things have changed in architectural design to such an extent that form is more important than function, and math skills are unnecessary. I call this the "if you can dream it, someone can build it" school of design.

There is virtually no engineering in the thesis paper. A committee, who obviously embraced the idea but had no understanding of the engineering limitations, endorsed the design concept. This is equivalent to proposing a design for an automobile that can take off and perform as an airplane while ignoring engineering details like required fuel capacity and engine size to achieve a desired range and load capacity.

All that said, I really do like the artistic rendering of the Gravia Lamp. Just add a power cord to plug it into a convenience outlet and forget the third-world villages. Perhaps the falling weight could still be used as an ON/OFF switch. In the thesis paper, removing just one of the five weights is supposed to stop the ball-screw mechanism from turning. If this were true, then the remaining four weights don%u2019t exert enough force to overcome friction in the mechanism. So, not only is it non-engineered, it is non-engineered in the worst way: it wastes over four-fifths or 80% of potential energy stored in the elevated weights! There is no explanation for why this was supposed to occur.

I recommend that everyone read the thesis paper here:

http://scholar.li...ency.pdf

Oops! Looks like things do not translate well after cutting and pasting from MS Word...


I recommend that everyone read the thesis paper here (delete carriage returns between lines):

http://scholar.lib.
vt.edu/theses/
available/etd-08292007
-103115/unrestricted/
resonant-frequency.pdf