Monday’s Friday Reads – 10 February 2020

1. oh good god, when marketing teams are designing the charging infrastructure….

   How can anyone fall for such obviously preposterous fluff? the energy recovered from sound will be microscopic amounts, I mean it wouldn’t be enough the run the car stereo. journalists need to be calling out this nonsense, or at the very least highlighting the actual numbers (with an actual units of measurement, not “enough to power a village” )

2. Reading station is, of course, busier than Paddington, something I don’t think the article mentions, nor the old joke about playing Snooker to get in: “You have to pot a Red, before you get a Colour!”

   Peugot: I would have thought that the actual power levels of “Noise” are much too low to be practicable – are you sure this article isn’t a spoof?

3. I wonder when “thunderf00t” on YouTube will deliver a debunking video for using sound to recharge vehicles? He has done other EV charging/powering related debunking videos.

   Related: marketers getting involved in the design/rollout of EV charge points. UK example: the rollout of charge points in Tesco car parks, supported by VW, including the installation of a power-hungry poster size flat panel into the charge point itself, presumably to show adverts (completely unnecessary)

4. The energy-from-sound story reminds me of the over-hyped solar road. Back in 2016, the French installed solar panels on a 1 km stretch of road, and promised to install a total of 1,000 km over the following five years. Most articles at the time waxed lyrical about the project, with the occasional wry aside (“Normandy is not known for its sunshine”). Needless to say it was an expensive flop, and the other 999 km were never installed.

5. @milest

   A modern LCD display is likely only taking 100w or similar, and since you likely need one for the payment system and controls anyway it’s hardly a huge compared to the 50,000w +? the chargers will be using.

   And if it gets them installed in convenient places like Tescos then it’ll be a lot less energy than driving out of your way to charge.

6. Spike Milligan, about 50 years ago, did a piece on ‘sonic electricity’ whereby sound was harnessed to provide energy. This was accompanied by footage of a 4-SUB with the guard (as they were called then) calling for ‘a nice rousing hallelujah chorus’ to get the train moving. So it can be done!

7. @Milest the advertiser is paying for the electricity, so at most Tesco stores the driver gets to charge for free.

8. @Greg
   I suppose you mean that Reading has more train movements than Paddington. Paddington (national rail only) has more than double the number of passenger entry/exits: that doesn’t include transfer passengers, but I can’t imagine that would be enough to overturn such a large difference.

   For the transfer passenger, finding your train was difficult the last couple of times I did that. I had to ask a helper at a desk, seemingly placed there in recognition that full information was not easily available to the transfer passenger. There was a “what’s leaving on other platforms” monitor and destination indicators on the footbridge leading down to the platforms. But these did not show comprehensive information on intermediate station calls. So I didn’t know which of the many departures to London Paddington was calling at the stations I wanted to go to on those occasions.

   @Andrew, @MilesT
   On ridiculous attempts at energy harvesting, I have also laughed at devices to collect the energy from the flexing of the pavement as a vehicle or pedestrian travels over it. It is bad enough that this energy is rather small. But even worse one can imagine tuning such a pavement to increase the quantity of energy harvested. This would in effect increase the drag on the vehicles, in effect forcing them to use more energy, so that you could imperfectly harvest it.

   @Quinlet
   Milligan’s idea is even funnier if you know something of the physics of choirs. As a choral singer, for a long time I was mystified why an unamplified soloist could sing against a large choir and still be heard. Did not 100 singers produce 100 times the volume of one singer? Even accounting for the fact that a trained soloist can sing very loudly, surely not 100 times louder. But I learned that a choir of 100 does not sing 100 times louder than the individuals who make it up, nowhere near. This is because there is a lot of destructive interference between the sound produced by the individual choir members singing a common line. If that wasn’t the case, the occasion I was in the Albert Hall listening to a choir of about 1500 individuals, we’d all have been permanently deafened. So a large a choir singing the Hallelujah Chorus would be a very efficient mechanism for sonic energy harvesting.

9. Ivsn
   Correct – considerably busier in terms of number of trains per day, particularly as Reading also gets through freights, which Padders onviously does not.

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