The Ear project

Now that my second semester of college is over, looking back at it, I feel that it was the semester of projects. I got involved in quite a number of things and some of them were quite fruitful. I’d like to think of my ‘ear project’ as one of those, although partially.

There were three of us on this project: Praveen, Pramukh and myself working it. And unlike any project, it had the strangest of beginnings.

A quick flashback to the first semester: It was EC class, and we were all making a whole lot of noise in the class (like school 😛 ). We were just discussing some random things and then Pramukh just quipped, “Dude, just look at our class! If we had ulitised all this noise properly, the country would have prospered by now. :D” Hard to believe, but that was what got us started. We really thought we could generate electricity out of sound. Both of us searched around the net for material, looked into our brains for ideas, but alas, there was none that got us anywhere! The sound energy was just too low for anything, and added to that was the problem of incomplete efficiency.

Then came second semester. Enter Praveen Kumar. We told him about the idea of generating electricity out of sound, and he said he’d think about it. He came with an idea after some time telling us that we could build an air column that resonates given the sound of one frequency. And maybe from that we could go somewhere? It looked promising, but it wasn’t right yet. We again hit our brains into thinking mode and computers into search mode. Then it came. The big idea. I googled “mechanical power amplification”. One of the searched items was a PhD thesis by some scholar. I deeply regret deleting the downloaded file of that thesis which dealt with ‘Mechanical power amplification by the hair cells of the auditory canal’ or something like that. Although our project has nothing to do with hair or hair cells, it gave us our idea.

The human ear is a fantastic device. It can hear sounds at very low intensities. And it has been found to be a completely passive device. It does not use any chemistry like the rest of the body to work, except for sending signals to the brain. That was what we found off the net. And we thought that was a start. We could build a device that has the geometry of the human ear. It could collect sound efficiently, well enough to maybe power some microelectronic devices. It wasn’t great, but it was definitely a start. We had the idea of presenting that at the science fest paper presentation.

 

From there we thought the sky was the limit. We ferociously started reading up on peizoes and flexoes and ferroes. We tried hard to give a solid theoretical background for it all, complete with assumptions and some never before seen interpretations. But Alas! There was too little time for that, and all our ‘theories’ had some or the other flaw, including one of mine that assumed that frequency of sound changed during waveshaping. Finally we gave up, went simple and just included some basic stuff in our ‘paper’. Our final model didn’t even resemble the human ear, but only had what we thought were some of its qualities. We gave it a fancy title though, “Acoustic Power Generation: Reverse Engineering the human ear”.

It would make the article boring if i included all technical details into it, so here’s the presentation which we showed finally. Yes we resorted to a few gimmicks here and there, but that was all right. 😉 The ear project

It went pretty well in the end. We did better than we expected. It was the first time that I had involved myself in such a thing. Its pretty shabby, but its an idea nonetheless. And at the end of the day, I was satisfied that we had reached somewhere. We still had to work a lot, but then came T2, the test which I eventually screwed up. And that was the point where work halted.

That, is the story of the ear project.

Its the end of the story, but is it the end of the project? Probably.