What is the Weather like where You Live?

[Peter]

Wet and shitty.  I pruned stuff in the garden during a brief dryish spell today.

I can't bring myself to prune in the winter. I have too many plants that flower on old wood.

I could use a clean-up on some of the herbaceous tops that I kept too long, though. Winter was late this year and I enjoyed it.

Winter still hasn't arrived this year; we go straight from Autumn to Spring these days, and not in a good way.  I have a lot of fruiting plants that need to be heavily pruned to keep them productive.  I also pruned some tree branches to make the trees more vertical and save me from getting whacked in the face by branches every time I venture into the garden.

I've been thinking of making a pond.  It would be a sort of L-shaped moat beside the path that would form a barrier to slugs and provide an interesting feature in the dark, soggy bits of the garden that are too overshadowed to grow much in.  One of the things I hate most about this garden is that we get a carpet of slugs right up the path from about March to November, so I'm hoping the moat will reduce the number of them that get onto it.  It would be nice to get frogs too, and they'd help control the slug population.  We have a pond already, but it's tiny.

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[Peter]

Today's weather has been brought to you by Suicide Inc; the company that solves all your problems.

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[Peter]

Finally, the world is saved!  Scotland will provide all the electricity we could ever need!

Researchers who study energy harvesting see energy all around us – we just need to find a way to capture that energy. One of the latest energy harvesting techniques is converting the mechanical energy from falling raindrops into electricity that can be used to power sensors and other electronics devices.
Scientists from CEA/Leti-Minatec, an R&D institute in Grenoble, France, specializing in microelectronics, have recently developed a system that recovers the vibration energy from a piezoelectric structure impacted by a falling raindrop. The system works with raindrops ranging in diameter from 1 to 5 mm, and simulations show that it’s possible to recover up to 12 milliwatts from one of the larger “downpour” drops.

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“Our work could be considered as a good alternative to power systems in raining outdoor environments where solar energy is difficult to exploit,” Thomas Jager told PhysOrg.com. He explained that the system could be used for both mobile outdoor devices as well as indoor power. “For example, we intend to develop remote sensor nodes in cooling towers, but abandoned sensor networks are also one of the foreseen applications for this type of system.”

As Jager and coauthors Romain Guigon, Jean-Jacques Chaillout, and Ghislain Despesse explain in a recent issue of Smart Materials and Structures, the physics of how a raindrop impacts a surface is not fully understood. However, to build a rain energy harvesting system, the important part is to estimate the recoverable energy during the impact.

When a raindrop impacts a surface, it produces a perfectly inelastic shock. The amount of energy generated by the impact can then be estimated using a mechanical-electric model.

To capture the raindrops’ mechanical energy, the scientists used a PVDF (polyvinylidene fluoride) polymer, a piezoelectric material that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy. When a raindrop impacts the 25-micrometer-thick PVDF, the polymer starts to vibrate. Electrodes embedded in the PVDF are used to recover the electrical charges generated by the vibrations.

The group experimented with raindrops of different sizes, falling heights, and speeds. They found that slow falling raindrops generate the most energy because raindrops falling at high speeds often lose some energy due to splash. By using a micropump to generate and test the properties of raindrops, the researchers demonstrated that, for low drop heights, the electrical energy is proportional to the square of the drop’s mechanical energy, while voltage and mechanical energy are directly proportional.

The largest raindrops caused the largest vibrations on the PVDF, and therefore generated the greatest amount of electrical energy. The researchers demonstrated that their system could generate 1 microwatt of continuous power as a worst-case scenario, while simulations showed that a single large raindrop might generate up to 12 milliwatts of power.

“The recoverable energy depends directly on the size of the piezoelectric membrane, the size of raindrops, and their frequency,” Jager explained. “The available energy per drop varies between 2 µJ from 1 mJ depending on its size.

“The corresponding instantaneous converted power starts from a few µW up to 10 mW for a converter area of a several square centimeters. An interesting figure to keep in mind could also be the available rain power per year in common France regions with a continental climate: almost 1 Wh per square meter per year.”

In the future, the scientists plan to develop a method to store the electrical power to provide a steady current for practical use.

More information: Guigon, Romain, Chaillout, Jean-Jacques, Jager, Thomas, and Despesse Ghislain. “Harvesting raindrop energy: theory” and “Harvesting raindrop energy: experimental study.” Smart Mater. Struct. 17 (2008) 015038-9.

[DirtDawg]

I'm a little jealous of your fruiting plants. The only ones I have that are semi-permanent are peaches and strawberries, but the strawberries have to have a lot of care to remain productive and the peaches are very susceptible to fungal diseases (We have several.)  making them hardly worth the bother. To me the peach trees are better as flowering sculptures.

I lost so many flowering plants last winter, due to an early warm-up and subsequent super freeze that I almost went "postal" or at least suicidal.

For edibles I have to stick with summer bearing annuals, but I do keep a few perennial herbs going.


Hey, your moat plan sounds really cool!

[Calandale]

SNOWING!


And sticking. A couple inches.

Have to go out in it.

[Soph]

Everything's spazzy in Urmston

[DirtDawg]

Warming up a bit. We had lows below zero three days in a row, with gusty winds, but today is in the mid thirties and sunny.

Seems nice.

[ozymandias]

We had 2-3 inches of fluffy snow, mid 20's temps, it's finally cleared out and the sky is clear.  It's full of stars!

[Calandale]

Stopped snowing.

But, 'twas cold enough to
bring ice cream home.

[duncvis]

calm and overcast, 7C/45F.

[DirtDawg]

calm and overcast, 7C/45F.

Almost exactly what our day was "supposed to be."  It was only barely above freezing, until after dark. We now have a warm wet wind blowing hard from the south. It's supposed to touch fifty degree mark before sun-up.

[DirtDawg]

Big change!
Most of the day was near or above fifty degrees and misty, but we just had a line of thunderstorms move through, with hail. Indianapolis even has a tornado on the radar.

 

There was over an inch of pea-sized hail on the ground, when it cleared up enough to see. We had sixty seven mile per hour winds, power lines down and trees blown over in the area and my kitty was very scared.

A fucking spring storm in January! More like January weather behind the storm front, though. It has dropped twenty eight degrees since sundown.







(Thank Calandale for encouraging me to mention my cat in every post. )

[Calandale]

(Thank Calandale for encouraging me to mention my cat in every post. )

Don't mind that, at all.

If you WANT to get my goat,
flood the pages with lots of cat
threads. Or really any single subject.

[Calandale]

Slush and THUNDER!

[DirtDawg]

(Thank Calandale for encouraging me to mention my cat in every post. )

Don't mind that, at all.

If you WANT to get my goat,
flood the pages with lots of cat
threads. Or really any single subject.

No, thanks. You can keep your goat. You are the one with such an affinity, not me.

I do like cats, though, especially my tiny ocelot-looking kitty.