Shoe-Mounted Generator Powers Portable Electronics
Senior engineering students at Rice University have created the PediPower - a prototype generator that turns motion into energy for small electronics and, eventually, for life-preserving medical devices. Houston, TX-based company Cameron approached the engineering team with the project. The prototype shoes deliver an average of 400 milliwatts, enough to charge a battery, and send energy through wires to a belt-mounted battery pack. A voltage regulator keeps it flowing steadily to the battery. The PediPower hits the ground before any other part of the shoe. A lever arm strikes first, and is attached to a gearbox that replaces much of the shoe's sole and turns the gears a little with each step. The gears drive a motor mounted on the outside of the shoe that generates electricity to send up to the battery.
Transcript
00:00:01 [Music] we are the agitation Squad sponsored by Cameron and they challenge us to create a device that could Harvest energy from Human movement so we decided to create a shoe device that would do just that to make this shoe generate power we needed to really find which way the most energy was wasted and had most potential for for Gathering so we really decid the
00:00:24 heel strike it was held by gravity so we could use that without really any added effort on the on the wear to generate the power cuz they're going to be putting that Force into the ground anyways and it's usually just absorbed by the foam of a shoe and we decided rather than let that foam absorb it and spring back we could drive some gears and drive a drive
00:00:47 a generator our sponsor is actually developing a artificial heart for a human and they wanted a a power source that would be reliable and always available so some something like this would be great because this Powers a battery pack while you're walking and then you will always have a source of power that's reliable and always available for your medical device which
00:01:11 you need to live for this at this stage um this could be used to power smaller portable Electronics such as a cell phone um but in the future um a better device more efficient would hopefully be able to power medical devices such such as uh smaller ones like a pacemaker or even an artificial heart what our device essentially is made up of is a lever arm
00:01:38 that is on oneway roller clutches so it only works in One Direction and this lever arm transmits you know the vertical motion of the heel strike through the gearbox horizontally through helical gears and as you could see the gearbox um it's about a gear reduction of 61 to1 so we're trans transmitting the high torque of a heel strike and converting it into high-speed rotation
00:02:06 which then leads into a generator as can be seen on this shoe here what this will be showing is that as it run as you step each step will produce a peak and power as you can see on the graph and then that will supply uh the electrical components and then each of these Peaks will level out um so that we could Supply a constant level of power to a device our goal with
00:02:33 this was just to prove that we could make a device that would produce power so that was really the the main thing we considered so things like size and weight and its effect on the user were kind of second in the future if another team picks this up um we would recommend them to figure out how to make it smaller uh make it lighter um there's a lot of excess material in this one that
00:02:57 can be removed um the pieces can be made smaller um and that's kind of Our Hope for the future for the for this device