Tech
Mobile devices could now be charged by your footsteps
In the not-too-distant future, you could simply charge your phone or any other mobile device by plugging it to your shoe.
A research by by University of Wisconsin-Madison mechanical engineers has seen them develop an innovative energy harvesting and storage technology.
The innovation could now reduce our reliance on the batteries in our mobile devices, ensuring we have power for our devices no matter where we are.
Read also: Car side mirrors may become extinct
A professor of mechanical engineering at UW-Madison, Tom Krupekin and J. Ashley Taylor, a senior scientist in UW-Madison’s Mechanical Engineering Department, in a paper published Nov. 16, 2015, in the journal Scientific Reports, described an energy-harvesting technology that’s particularly well suited for capturing the energy of human motion to power mobile electronic devices.
The technology could enable a footwear-embedded energy harvester that captures energy produced by humans during walking and stores it for later use.
“Human walking carries a lot of energy,” Krupenkin says. “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.”
Krupenkin says tapping into just a small amount of that energy is enough to power a wide range of mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptop computers and flashlights.
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