Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello,
Each day people from all over the world are constantly typing on their keyboards. I want my project to help in the energy crisis by producing electricity from these constant typing movements. I would be very honoured if you suggest in ways to produce electricity by typing. I do know that when two metals collide an electric spark is produced and a very low power as well so would it be possible if I attached the base of the keyboard keys with a metal and put a metal sheet in the keyboard too? The rubbing of these metals will produce some power which when multiplied by the total lettere in the word and later on the total words typed will produce a large power. Thankyou

This is a very interesting idea! I'm not an electrical expert but to start to get ideas on how to generate electrical energy from a keyboard include I suggest you research they ways we generate power using motion such as power turbines and hydroelectric power. These might be able to be translated in a very simplified and very small scale way to a keyboard button.

Additionally, your project reminds me of a news story I saw a while back - generating power from fabrics using nanotechnology.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/style ... 41946.html

Good luck!

Audrey

Hello there,

To add to Audrey's excellent suggestions - a good place to look for an overview of the topic you are looking into is the Wikipedia article on energy harvesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_harvesting

Whenever a force is exerted over a distance, there is energy. Your intuition is good - the act of typing exerts a small force over a small distance. Multiply this by a lot of typing, and it might be a good amount of energy - maybe not enough to solve the world's energy problems, but perhaps enough to help charge the battery or help with some auxiliary function on the computer.

A good starting point for your idea would be to estimate how much energy is being used when typing at a normal speed.

A good equation to know for this:

Work (energy) = force * distance

You may want to research what kind of force is used when hitting a key on a keyboard - this itself could be a science fair topic. How would you measure this force? How would you estimate it? What about the distance - how far down does a key go when you hit it? Is the force constant during the entire keystroke? What are the assumptions? Once you get energy per keystroke, how many keystrokes per second usually happens when somebody is typing?

Once you have a ballpark figure of how much energy is used when typing, you can get an idea of whether it is worth it to harvest the energy. Once you've figure this out, and if you determine that it is indeed worth it, then check out Audrey's ideas and the link I gave above on energy harvesting techniques. Try to figure out which method would work best for a keyboard - and if you don't see a good method, try to invent a new one! Feel free to respond with more ideas or questions.

Good luck!