ScienceDaily (Nov. 23, 2009) — A group of researchers at the
City College of New York is developing a new way to generate
power for planes and automobiles based on materials known as
piezoelectrics, which convert the kinetic energy of motion into
electricity. They presented their concept at the 62nd Annual
Meeting of the American Physical Society's (APS) Division of
Fluid Dynamics. About a half-inch by one inch in size, these
devices might be mounted on the roof or tail of a car or on an
airplane fuselage where they would vibrate inside a flow,
producing an output voltage. The power generated would not be
enough to replace that supplied by the combustion engines, but
it could run some system -- such as batteries that would be used
to charge control panels and other small electronic devices such
as mobile phones. Led by CCNY professor Yiannis Andreopoulos,
the researchers are currently attempting to optimize these
devices by modeling the physical forces to which they are
subjected in different air flows -- on