How to produce electricity during a snow storm: Piezo Snow Roof

Did you remember when astronaut Mark Watney get stuck in Mars, after the whole Ares III mission was hit for a strong dust storm, while exploring the Acidalia Planitia? , well in light of the successful and entertainment movie “The Martian” (released last year, directed by Ridley Scott), Microsoft Design launched a design challenge named #HackMars, in order to help our friend Mark Watney ( interpreted by Matt Damon) survive in Mars and to bring him back home.

So, we participated in that challenge last year with our design “Mars Piezo Rover”.

Basically, we modified the two Mars Rovers the astronaut had available in Mars; since the Martian dust storm season is pretty long, it was too difficult to generate electricity using the solar panels, in addition the radioisotope power system available was no enough to support the extended mission, therefore we created the “Mars Piezo Rover” which in essence is a sort of Martian sailing boat.

We used the huge parachute available (the Martian atmosphere is thinner than Earth atmosphere, therefore it is necessary to use a quite bigger parachute for descending and landing in the red planet) to create a main-sail/jib mechanism which was installed on the roof of the rover.Additionally, we placed plenty of piezoelectric transducers on top of the main-sail fabric (a.k.a the modified parachute) in order to transform the mechanical force produced by the dust storm hitting the main-sail and the jib, into electricity (taking advantage of the Piezoelectric effect, which is the appearance of an electrical potential voltage across the sides of a crystal when you subject it to mechanical stress) which was storage in a capacitor battery system.

Well, we are suggesting here, the design and construction of a sort of “Piezo Snow Roof/Wall” in order to take advantage of the piezoelectric effect during a snow storm.

The “Piezo Snow Mechanism” could be installed in government buildings, airports, military and sport facilities, in territories that are constantly or periodically being buried by snow storms.