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Low-Tech Magazine: Human Powered Air Compressor and Energy Storage System
(solar.lowtechmagazine.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Technology
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I wonder how efficient it is. Let's say the bike is 90% efficient, the pump is 70% efficient and the pneumatic power tools are 70% efficient, so you get 44.1% efficiency.
If you give or take 10% from/to each of those, you can get as low as 28.8% efficient or as high as 64% efficient.
If you build the electic equivalent (generator, battery and electric powertools) it is probably twice as efficient or more. Pedal for only a half to a third as long.
Adding to this: This is basically turning solar energy in stored energy. Solar power-> growing Plants-> Man eats Plants-> kinetic energy-> storage
Simply take a solar panel and a battery.
You loose around 30% of energy from the sun through the atmosphere, plants are about 3% efficient at turning light into sugar, humans are about 25% efficient at turning food into mechanical energy, so you are only about 0.525% efficient at turning energy from the sun into human power on earth. So you this device is only about 0.231525% efficient at turning solar power into usable work.
Assuming 80% efficiency for the electric variant, 20% efficiency for solar panels, 90% efficiency for robots to turn electricity into mechanical work, that's 14.4% efficient. Then it's like 62.196307 times more efficient to become a solar electric android and pedal on it in space.