A shoe sole with an embedded energy harvester sits next to a first Practical footwear using sole with embedded harvester developed by the UW-Madison researchers” startup company, InStep NanoPower, and Vibram.
When you”re on the go and your smartphone battery is low, in the not-so-distant future you could charge it simply by plugging it into your shoe.
An innovative energy harvesting and storage technology developed by University of Wisconsin-Madison mechanical engineers could reduce our reliance on the batteries in our mobile devices, ensuring we have power for our devices no matter where we are.
In a paper published Nov. 16, 2015, in the journal Scientific Reports, Tom Krupenkin, a professor of mechanical engineering at UW-Madison, and J. Ashley Taylor, a senior scientist in UW-Madison”s Mechanical Engineering Department, 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.
February 19, 2016 | Originally published by Date Line: February 19 on