Dance floor that produces electricity
Author :
Makarand karkare
Blog :Makarands Musings
Date: 11/26/2011 5:04:56 PM
Do you believe that a dance floor can generate all the electricity 
it needs from the people who dance on the floor? Sounds unbelievable? Then read on.
Piezoelectricity is the charge which accumulates in certain solid materials (notably crystals, certain ceramics, and biological matter such as bone, DNA and various proteins) in response to applied mechanical stress.The word piezoelectricity means electricity resulting from pressure.
All of us use at least one thing that uses Piezoelectricity. The gas lighter. It has a piezoelectric crystal. When we press the nob, the crystal gets compressed generating a potential difference between the two faces of the crystal. This is then used to generate a spark which lights the gas stove.
I received a mail today about “10 Green Ideas”. one of the ideas was a dancing floor that generates electricity.
All the flashing strobes and pounding speakers at the dance club are massive consumers of electrical power. So Bar Surya, in London, re-outfitted its floor with springs that, when compressed by dancers, could produce electrical current that would be stored in batteries and used to offset some of the club’s electrical burden.
This aroused my curiosity and I researched a little more. Here is the news story that announces opening of “the first eco-nightclub” of England.
Mr Charalambous, Tory donor and head of the climate change organisation called Club4Climate, said he hoped to use clubbing to inspire young people to tackle global warming.
‘This is a new way to draw in the young generation,’ he said.
‘Unless we stop preaching to people and use an inclusive philosophy we’re never going to create the revolution to combat climate change.
‘There is no greater platform than clubbing to reach out to young people.’
The dance floor uses the concept of piezoelectricity, where crystals and ceramics create a charge to generate electricity. The diagram below describes how the dance floor works.
This is quite innovative. Does this really work? And what is the investment needed to install something like this?
Just a few months ago, around the time I had written a post about charging the cell phone while breathing, I & Sandeep Shah, a close friend, were passing in front of the crowed railway station. We were discussing other green ideas. Sandeep looked at the huge crowd coming out of the Sion station and wondered if foot falls of all these people could somehow be used to generate electricity. I found the answer today.
What if we created similar floors on ALL our local railway stations in Mumbai. We should definitely be able to generate enough to do all the lightening on the railway station using people’s foot falls. How is that for an idea. 
