Your Shoes May Become Next Energy Source

Date: 13 February 2016 - 21:11

News ID: ۲۳۸۰۰

TEHRAN (IRNA) Thanks to a new energy harvesting and storage technology, developed by the bright minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, our shoes may become our next energy source.
Our phones seem to have a nasty habit of running out of juice when we’re running about, but soon, we may be able to harness all that running energy to the benefit of our mobile devices.

A paper, published late last year in Scientific Reports, details how human motion could be captured and then utilized in order to power mobile devices. And this may spell just the beginning of power-generating shoes, yahoo.com reported.

Power-generating shoes could be especially useful for the military, as soldiers currently carry heavy batteries to power their radios, GPS units, and night-vision goggles in the field. The advance could also provide a source of power to people in remote areas and developing countries that lack adequate electrical power grids.

"Human walking carries a lot of energy,” Tom Krupenkin, a professor of mechanical engineering at UW-Madison said. "Theoretical estimates show that it can produce up to 10 watts per shoe, and that energy is just wasted as heat.

A total of 20 watts from walking is not a small thing, especially compared to the power requirements of the majority of modern mobile devices.”

From your phone to your tablet to just about anything that requires batteries for operation, Krupenkin and his colleague J. Ashley Taylor believe that this technology could be a game-changer in the energy space.

While using kinetic energy to power devices is not a new concept, actually achieving success has been tricky, to say the least. Because of the relatively small displacements and large forces of footfalls, harvesting and then converting energy has previously proven difficult.

But Krupenkin’s team has been looking into new methods of directly converting mechanical motion into electrical energy that are appropriate for this type of application, he said.

Pic of day
Two Iranian music groups, Khorshid and Vaziri, performed concerts at Vahdat Hall, on Friday.Courtesy: Mehr News Agency