Piezoelectricity Question....

[exxcomm0n]

Interesting idea there atomicX.

It got me to thinking about a different types of wind generation as you were posting.

What if the panel in the air were shaped as the picture attached (or even better yet as "wings", I'll explain later.) would the shutter movement opening slots in it's opposing sides that are alternately opened/closed depending on the shutter.
If it faces into the wind, the shuttering of alternate sides, it rocks back and forth which twists a plate between 2 quartz crystal slabs (I'm not even sure if they can be formed that way, or the cost) creating an alternating current from each plate that is diametrically opposed in charge?

Perhaps a better  arrangement might be vertically mounted wing blades that provide alternate lift/drag into the oncoming wind and could be varied slightly to create an oscillating effect without too violent a stress reversal and low energy cost for that wing blade movement.

But what is the voltage/amperage potential per what size crystal with what amount of pressure?
Does it scale linearly with size of the crystal and compressed surface area?
Does force have to be applied over the entire face of the crystal structure to generate current, or can the alternate crystal end compression method proposed above work?

My experience w/ piezo electric is limited to cheap quick shop lighters, but they've always fascinated me and I've wondered since they (piezoelectric devices) can be manufactured so cheaply why that can't be scaled to different applications.

[hypersoniq]

The trick in harnessing (or more correctly "harvesting") useful energy from a piezoelectric crystal is a 2 stage circuit

1. AC/DC converter to get the flow one way.
2. DC/DC converter to provide the proper power to charge a rechargable cell.

Penn State researchers were working on a circuit for this a few years back (i'll find the link later)

[exxcomm0n]

Oh...it was late, and so now is this picture.

But that's what i was talking about above.....

[atomicX]

You have good design concept ex.  I'm really simple mind.  What I would do is make a huge weight sitting on top of surface made of peizo quartz.  The huge weight have intetmediate connection to diodes which allow current to go 1 way.  We just sit there and collect dripple of current passing through the diodes array (like hypersonic mention). You can incooporate wind pushing details to enchance the current.  But if you have the size of the great pyramid sitting on top of the quartz, I think there's enough electricity to fry some chicken dinner. 

You have to understand that it's not the size or the force.  It's the effective force, or pressure.  If you have 10 kg sitting on a 100m^2 surface, there is almost zero pressure.  If you put 10 kg on a pin like surface, you're now exerting enormouse pressure. 

[exxcomm0n]

@ atomicX

Yup, that's (lots of pressure in a small area) sort of where I was going, but I didn't think enough into it @ the time.

The variable wing/vane concept would work much better for keeping the wind assembly facing into the oncoming wind and be up/down capable instead (from the same concept that gives us flight), as well as alternately being oriented for side to side motion.

EDIT

The up/down pressure potential is good as it uses the weight of the pole as a constant and if the "wings" were horizontal to provide "lift", you could oscillate between lift/drop for compression variance.
But that would be only 1 area of generation, and the fulcrum addition might make it possible to have 2.

If the pole or post the wind assembly is mounted to functions as a fulcrum for the compression material the "slab" of quartz becomes 4 separate quartz crystals mounted @ the 4 corners of the compression material so that leverage can exert much more compression force in proportion to the wind strength.

EDIT

See the attached pic.

But before I'd go farther into it, I'd like to get some answers to the questions I posed before as to whether the research and development into the idea would be fruitful.

I'll do some web crawling a little later today to see if I can find some hard numbers on piezo output.