SONEA Produces Energy From Noise

Making use of omnipresent but wasted potential energy sources is what the green movement is all about. The SONEA, designed by Jihoon Kim, Boyeon Kim, Myung-Suk Kim, and Da-Woon Chung, makes use of one of the most annoying, otherwise-useless forms of energy out there: noise. Think about how much noise there is when you walk out into a crowded city street at any given moment of the day. And it’s all for naught. Imagine if there was a reverse speaker of sorts that was able to capture all that wasted noise and store it as usable energy. The SONEA design uses a noise capturing surface paired with a sonic electric tranducer that converts the noise energy into electricity, which is then stored via an electric cell module. The device’s rating is 30 watts per 1 captured decibal.

As further outlined by the designer, capturing the noise produced by the take-off of one airplane could provide 240 kW. Given dimensions of just 450 x 450 x 80 millimeters, it would be theoretically easy to attach millions of these little devices wherever noise levels are highest. Of course, there are probably a thousand different technical flaws that will make this improbable, outlandishly expensive and/or straight-up impossible, but we can certainly dream. Judging by the last picture in the gallery, it’s also a good way to protect your junk, if all else fails. [via Yanko]