Footstep energy harvesting using heel strike-induced airflow for human activity sensing
Author(s)
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Body sensor networks are increasingly popular in healthcare, sports, military and security. However, the power supply from conventional batteries is a key bottleneck for the development of body condition monitoring. Energy harvesting from human motion to power wearable or implantable devices is a promising alternative. This paper presents an airflow energy harvester to harness human motion energy from footsteps. An air bladder-turbine energy harvester is designed to convert the footstep motion into electrical energy. The bladders are embedded in shoes to induce airflow from foot-strikes. The turbine is employed to generate electrical energy from airflow. The design parameters of the turbine rotor, including the blade number and the inner diameter of the blades (the diameter of the turbine shaft), were optimized using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method. A prototype was developed and tested with footsteps from a 65 kg person. The peak output power of the harvester was first measured for different resistive loads and showed a maximum value of 90.6 mW with a 30.4 Ω load. The harvested energy was then regulated and stored in a power management circuit. 14.8 mJ was stored in the circuit from 165 footsteps, which means 90 μJ was obtained per footstep. The regulated energy was finally used to fully power a fitness tracker which consists of a pedometer and a Bluetooth module. 7.38 mJ was consumed by the tracker per Bluetooth configuration and data transmission. The tracker operated normally with the harvester working continuously.
Date Issued
2016-07-21
Date Acceptance
2016-06-14
Citation
2016 IEEE 13th International Conference on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks (BSN),, 2016, pp.124-129
ISSN
2376-8886
Publisher
IEEE
Start Page
124
End Page
129
Journal / Book Title
2016 IEEE 13th International Conference on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks (BSN),
Copyright Statement
© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Identifier
http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000391251700023&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=1ba7043ffcc86c417c072aa74d649202
Source
13th IEEE International Conference on Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Networks (BSN)
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Physical Sciences
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
Optics
Engineering
DEVICES
DESIGN
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2016-06-14
Finish Date
2016-06-17
Coverage Spatial
San Francisco, CA