Power Full Jogging Shoes

September 1st, 2011 by Chris Milton

Ever wondered, as you pound along the pavements, just how much power your jogging could be generating? Well, now we have an answer: up to a whole kilowatt during a quick sprint.

This is according to Tom Krupenkin, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He and a fellow researcher, J Ashley Taylor, have come up with an innovative new way of harnessing that power using liquid-based energy harvesters embedded into people’s shoes.

Grabbing power from a person’s jogging or walking action is nothing new but it has often involved a large and clunky apparatus surrounding the person’s shoes. The Krupenkin-Taylor solution is much more elegant.

In effect, a small pouch of liquid is inserted into the sole of a specially made shoe. The contents of the pouch interact with a nanostructure to produce an electric current in a process known as reverse electrowetting, which is fully described in this paper published by the journal Nature.

The liquid used can be anything from water to oil, but Krupenkin & Taylor have come up with a special formulation which will give an equivalent charge of one kilowatt per square metre, which they describe as “non-corrosive, non-toxic and inexpensive.” This they hope to hook up to a hermetically sealed battery which will store up to 20 watts of power.

20 watts isn’t a huge amount. However, it is good for lots of localised battery-operated things. For example, one of the areas they’re looking at is embedding the device into army boots to power soldiers’ infrared goggles, radios, etc.

However, I think the most interesting idea is to use the technology to lengthen your smart phone’s battery life.

How? Well, whenever your phone (or laptop, etc) communicates with its WiFi / phone cell / etc, it uses long-range radio frequencies which eat up a lot of power. However, if the shoes also came with an inbuilt WiFi hotspot, that could to the heavy-lifting long-range broadcast, leaving your phone to broadcast on the much-less-power-consuming bluetooth frequencies.

This, when you think about it, is pretty neat.

Now, due to some well knackered ankles, I don’t do a lot of jogging … I power myself around by bicycle instead, and I don’t know if it would work so well for that.

However, I do have that horrid habit of being unable to sit still when on the telephone. So, this could be just the thing for me and will make me feel less guilty next time I’m wandering around the house in the middle of an interview! Now, all I need to do is start jogging at the same time!

Picture Credit: Female jogger from Morro Bay by Mike Baird under CC Attribution License

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Tags: hotspor, J. Ashley Taylor, nature, power jogging, smartphone battery life, Tom Krupenkin, University of Wisconsin–Madison, wifi

About the Author

Chris Milton is a seasoned sustainability journalist focusing on business, finance and clean technology. His writing's been carried by a number of highly respected publishers, including The Guardian, The Washington Post and Scientific American. You can follow him on twitter as @britesprite, where he's one of Mashable's top green tweeters and Fast Company's CSR thought leaders. Alternatively you can follow him to the shops... but that would be boring.