What is buoyant force and how can we harness its power?
Buoyancy is the force that enables boats float on water. The term buoyant force refers to the upward-directed force that a fluid (either a liquid or a gas) exerts on an object that is partially or completely immersed in the fluid. Buoyant force also explains why we can lift objects underwater more easily than on land.
Unlike gravitational force which has a downward direction, buoyant force has an upward direction. This means releasing a pressurized object from the bottom of a water body creates kinetic energy, this can then be converted to mechanical energy, then to electrical energy. This is not a new technology, as various researchers and companies have tried over the years to make this solution viable, but with persistence and a pinch of innovation from our part at Buolectric, we think we have cracked the code to energy from buoyant force.
8 feet prototype
Our Story
I work in the renewable energy space, and had spent 10 years of my life building waste to energy solutions (anaerobic digesters and gasification plants). My son in reception class had just been taught about climate change, pv solar and batteries.
He comes home from school and says to me, daddy, why don't you build a battery to store all the energy we need at home. I smiled and said, no problem son, I will build a battery, this was just to get my persistent son off my back.
Months later and an afternoon having fun at the swimming pool, that lightbulb moment hit me when I tried to push a beach ball down into the pool. It required a bit of force, and as I took the ball to the bottom of the pool and released it, the beach ball sped upwards, and launched out of the swimming pool.
Could buoyant force be the battery solution my son asked me to build?
I put a team together and we got to work fabricating a crude 8 feet water tower in-house proof of concept, asking ourselves if it was possible to generate and sustain electricity from buoyant force. The crude system generated electricity for a split second! we ran around in excitement!!! Yes it is possible...
We then went into full research and design mode, not just for energy generation, but for energy storage as well.
Our vision is to build 25 to 75 feet buoyancy systems, generating 20kW to 100kW of electricity for our captive power clients over the world, while playing our part in the global energy mix to get the world to a netzero future.
Medium to Long term Energy Storage.
- Batteries – a range of electrochemical storage solutions, including advanced chemistry batteries and flow batteries.
- Thermal – capturing heat and cold to create energy on demand or offset energy needs.
- Mechanical Storage – other innovative technologies to harness kinetic or gravitational energy to store electricity.
- Hydrogen – excess electricity generation can be converted into hydrogen via electrolysis and stored.
- Pumped Hydropower – creating large-scale reservoirs of energy with water..
- What else? - please invent and innovate...
Famous quotes on energy and a cabron neutral future...
Our world is going through a slow but clear and present threat. GHG’s including CO2 from fossil fuel based power generation are responsible for climate change. While the world is switching to renewable sources of power like solar and wind,
these are still intermittent and cannot always supply the required dispatchable power to customers. Storing energy in batteries seems to be the solution to this intermittency, but storage costs from lithium ion batteries are quite expensive
and other upcoming battery technology costs are also still high. Mechanical energy generation and storage from buoyancy provides a cheaper solution to this challenge.
There are a few mechanical energy generation and storage solutions out there; wind, hydro, pumped hydro, gravity systems, compressed air. Developing and harnessing all these forms of energy is crucial to a carbon neutral future.
Buolectric was formed out of the need for energy independence, affordable electricity and saving our planet.