Rail travel is one of the greenest means of traveling across the country, but it could be even more efficient if the infrastructure itself produced electricity. Companies have already come up with plans to harness energy from passing trains using piezoelectric pads, and now two designers have developed a device that could harness the wind energy produced by speeding trains.
Ale Leonetti Luparinia and Qian Jiang’s T-Box is a power generator that captures wind energy from passing trains. It is designed to be installed into the spaces between existing rail tracks – around 150 T-Boxes could hypothetically be installed over 1km of track.
A passing train travelling at 200 kph would produce a wind speed equivalent to 15 m/sec. The T-Box would be able to catch this wind and produce about 3,500 W of power. If the train was 200m long, going at a speed of 300 kph and travelled 1km in 18 seconds, the T-Boxes would be able to produce about 2.6 KWh. This energy could then be utilized to power remote areas that don’t have electricity or rail sub-systems.