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To explore the breadth of issues that confront our society in its need for clean, affordable and reliable energy, students on this team partnered with faculty on year-long projects focusing on identifying, designing and prototyping new energy technologies, systems or approaches. Subteams addressed the tradeoffs among technological design choices, environmental impacts, economic viability and other issues related to use. Their goal was to produce a useful prototype and evaluate its environmental benefits and viability.
This year, students created a low-budget prototype anaerobic digester to generate methane from Duke’s food waste, an energy information tool to increase transparency in Duke's energy usage, and a piezoelectric energy prototype (below).
Vibe-Energy
Poster by Mudit Agrawal, Robbie Amann, Didac Garcia-Grau, Morgan Linsley, Jordana Rockley and Misha Schiever
Our team researched piezoelectricity, electricity generated from vibrations, as a new form of renewable energy. We developed a functioning model that was then tested in the Duke Chiller Plant to collect energy from the vibrations of the machinery. The outcome of our research is a scalable prototype that has the potential to increase the energy efficiency of many sectors that have consistent noise pollution.