EEs/MEs/Physicists/Genetic engineers: Hamster energy system design

Factual Questions
1

I was about to post this in a nearby thread Keeping the Internet running when the electricity goes off. I opened the thread eagerly, having read the hed literally. Alas, it was on a good topic, but one only relating to OP’s corner on the Net. The conversation was zeroing in on battery storage of some kind. Senegoid helpfully suggested hamsters.

It has long been suggested (and sometimes assumed) that hamsters power SD. So, here’s where I’m going with it. First, a quick Google or two turned up data on hamster power from Dan Fink, on 12/13/2005, Science for Kids: Hamster Power:

Question
About how much energy can a hamster on a wheel generate?

Answer
Hi Hannah.
I was able to get Skippy the hamster to produce peaks of about 150 milliamps of current at 3 volts, and 3 * 0.150 = 0.45 Watts. However, this was like running up hill for him – he wouldn’t run for very long before getting tired. So I experimented, and found he would run for his usual 3-4 hours per night if I turned the output down to 50 milliamps – like running up a hill, but not as steep. So, thats 0.050 * 3 = 0.15 Watts, * 4 hours = 0.6 Watt/hours per night. That’s the same unit of measure as your family’s power bill each month, except your power bill is in kiloWatt hours – one kW/hr = 1000 Watt hours, to give you an idea of how much power he could make.

In addition, I found this in a thread at AnandTech Forums discussing applications of hamster energy. On 1/18/11 8:33 PM, Rubycon noted:

Any sort of load north of 100mA at 3-4VDC is going to make the resistance too stiff for the little guy and he or she will not use it. The resistance of the wheel spinning is very small and once it gets going the inertia is nearly pushing him!

So there’s that.
I do not have the mad skillz to suggest ways to make a (genetically engineered?) hamster/(superconducting, frictionless?) cage system work–perhaps the cage turbine should be jettisoned, even. I presume many sub systems would have to be coupled be generate enough power for, say, the computer hosting SD.

This is all over my head but I think the people here could do it justice. I got mad when I saw a perfectly respectable SD topic pre-empted.

2

I am no EE/ME/Physicist but was once a geneticist.

Mutations in the MSTN myostatin gene can result in doubling of muscle mass in dogs. Similar results have been observed in mice with a mutant form of the NCoR1 gene which show increased numbers of mitochondria and increased muscle mass.

Assuming there are homologs in hamsters, perhaps a super hamster could be bred with exceptional muscle mass and the endurance to power a hamster wheel at higher resistance and with higher wattage output for prolonged periods of time.

I’ll leave it up the the EE’s to figure out how to wire up the exercise wheels for a colony of such super hamsters to provide the needed output to keep the internet humming during a power outage.

3

OP, you saying I pre-empted that thread? Or you saying everyone else but me hijacked it? :slight_smile:

Literature review of the subject (some prior SDMB threads and other sources):

Hamster Power ( Arken, 03-13-2001 )

Have seroius [sic] attempts at “Hamster Power” been tried? ( I can’t believe that’s butter!, 01-30-2003 )

How many hamsters would it take to power your home? ( Incubus, 05-26-2005 )

The hamster has been running for SIX HOURS ( The Hamster King, 01-21-2007 )

Powering the SDMB by Hamster - No, I Mean REALLY Doing It ( TheLoadedDog, 03-13-2008 )

Run, hamster, run: hamster-powered generators finally a reality ( David Ramli, PC World Good Gear Guide, 16 February, 2009 )

Actually, that doesn’t seem like a really whole lot of hamsters, does it?

Could We Produce Power from Hamsters in Wheels? ( JoshuaSD, 03-21-2012 )

(Iggy’s remark, above, about making a GMO hamster, is what suggested this post title, “Hamster Khan” to me.)

4

But here’s a thought:

Actual hamster wheels, I suppose, are built to have as low a resistance as possible in the bearings. (Note the thread cited above that The Hamster King’s critter ran for SIX HOURS.)

But if you were actually going to connect that to a generator to capture electric power, there would necessarily be resistance there. It’s that very resistance that is caused by work being done, namely the work of generating electricity.

You want to build your wheels (or wind turbines or whatever) with as little extraneous resistance as possible (e.g., in the bearings), but the generator itself will have resistance, otherwise it’s no generator.

ETA: tl;dr version: The hamsters will actually have to do some real work; no avoiding it.

5

Super hamster with exceptional mass! Photo

6

Unfortunately, our puny technology is incapable of making a hamster wheel able to contain him. All that energy will go to waste.

7

Clearly what we need is a miniature giant space hamster.

But to the OP: If we take the figure of .15 watts, double it to allow for a genetically-engineered super-hamster, and then halve it again to account for duty cycle (the critter isn’t spending all of its time running), then it’d take 6 or 7 hamsters to give you even one watt. The lowest figure I can find at a cursory Google for a computer’s average power consumption (not including the monitor) is 20 watts. So you’d need about 130 hamsters per computer.

8

you can skip the genetics if you have teams of hamster. you rotate the critters from the wheels to comfy sound proof burrows. you play dog barking sounds behind the ones on the wheels.

alternately you could try a rowing machine.