Hello,

According to http://www.pavegen.com/ or http://www.energy-floors.com/products/sustainable_energy_floor/ you can extract energy from the footsteps from a pedestrian. My guess is that they work storing the energy used in a footstep with some kind of elastic material.

I hope this helps!

Hello,

Thank you for the information and resource. This has opened up a new concept of renewable energy.

I am also looking into something that can be put in our regular shoe and also generate a power for individual use.

Hi Vivek, I guess that if you are looking for a power of individual use for locomotion, you could start by thinking that locomotion is an efficient task per se. I mean that if someone can walk with no effort, is due to the continuos tradeoff between kinematic and dynamic energies. And for sure that it would be interesting to integrate body heat with an applied function.

Hello Vivek Trivedi,

I have thougth about this matter recently for teaching purpose. Work is the Result of Force multiplied with the way it works. Well, you get the force by the weight of the walking person and gravitation, further you get the way it works by the way some aktuator is pushed down.

Option one: the actuator is in the floor. How far you might push it down before you stumble? 5 mm? With a average weigth of around 70 kg you could gain 3,5 Joule per step.

Well obviously you cannot do anything about gravitation, you probably don't want to get more heavy people, so the only possibility is to have a longer way for the force to work. Then you will get something like stairs, that move down by the weigth of the person trotting on them. But you have to take into account the different weights resulting in different way the force works. But now you have to take care, where you step. To me this sounds quite complicated. It would be much easier to tear down the elevators and spare the energy!

Option two: the actuator is in the shoe. Welcome back to plateau boots. Technically it is much easier to convert the energy, because the actuator could be adapted to the person wearing the shoe. The problem is storing the energy, but you might think in the direction of loading mobiles or alike by just laying it on some charging station.

You mentioned body heat. There are converters like thermoelectric converters or differential stirling engines or some gears working with wires from nickel alloys (dont' know the english word, in german: Formgedächtnislegierung). But keep in mind, that you need some temperature gradient as driving force and that you raise the thermal resistance. It might sot be a smart idea on a hot sunny day. Beware of "athlete's foot" - the english word gives the meaning much better than the german one.

Good luck, but energy you don't waste you don't have to generate.

Greetings

Jörg Ho