Have you ever been in a sports stadium when the crowd is so loud it shakes the concrete skeleton of the stands? What if you could harness that passion and energy into a power source?
Gyeongyun Lily Min, a high school senior in Lake Charles, Louisiana, was inspired by Pixar’s Monster’s Inc. to design a collection system that could harness the soundwaves generated by sports fans and convert them into electricity to power the stadium.
If you’ve never seen the classic Pixar film, the plot centers around two monsters, who work as employees of a utilities company that powers a civilization of monsters through harnessing children’s screams.
“This imaginative concept sparked my curiosity about the potential of converting sound into usable energy,” explains Gyeongyun. “I began to wonder if, in reality, we could harness the abundant noise in environments like sports arenas and use it to generate electricity.”
The concept involves the piezoelectric effect, which allows certain mechanisms to generate electricity in response to applied pressure. The principle has been applied before to make electricity-generating roads, and was recently utilized to design an internal cochlear implant.
In 2021, another youth engineer, Jeremiah Thoronka, was honored with the Chegg.org Global Student Prize 2021 for a piezoelectric machine that delivers electricity to homes by absorbing kinetic energy from vehicles passing over roadways.
The device powers 150 small homes, doesn’t rely on changing weather patterns, and needs no battery or external power infrastructure.
Gyeongyun had another idea which was rather than absorbing direct kinetic force like that applied from a footstep or the movement of a car, she would arrange a series of harvester models that could absorb the kinetic force from soundwaves.
To test her theory she built a 22 by 12-inch scale model of a typical arena according to the NBA court size specifications. She then played sounds at either 70 decibels or 100 decibels to simulate crowd noise in the arena while experimenting with different placements of the harvester modules.
The experiment’s piezoelectric equipment wasn’t ideal or of high quality, unfortunately, and while able to generate and deliver electricity during the testing, the amounts gathered were small—measured in the milliwatts, rather than watts.
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Gyeongyun hypothesizes that with more sophisticated equipment and on a larger scale, enough power could be generated to make a meaningful contribution to reducing the energy consumption of a typical sports arena, even if the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
The harvesting of soundwaves to generate electricity lends itself to a variety of large-scale environments typical of modern cities. Gyeongyun explains to Smithsonian Magazine.
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“In urban areas with heavy traffic, the constant noise from vehicles could be harnessed to generate electricity, contributing to the energy needs of city infrastructure,” Gyeongyun says. “Manufacturing plants, which often have continuous machinery noise, could integrate piezoelectric devices to capture and convert these sound vibrations into electrical energy, thereby reducing their overall energy consumption and improving sustainability.”
While coming up short of other young geniuses, Gyeongyun’s entry of her experiment in the latest run of the Regeneron International Science Fair, the oldest and most prestigious in the country, did secure her a spot among the finalists and a number of plaudits besides.
WATCH Gyeongyun explain her device…
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