Shoe-Based Energy Harvesting Using Ionic Polymer Metal Composites

Mechanical energy harvesting from human motion is new technology for generating clean and reasonable electrical energy for powering wearable devices used in health monitoring, gait analysis and so on. In this document, design and analysis of ionic polymer metal composite-based shoe energy harvester is proposed. Ionic polymer metal composite (IPMC) is a smart material of electroactive polymer categories and functionally similar to piezoelectric material and can be used as actuator, sensors or energy harvester. The harvester is based on specially designed two initially curved plates of spring steel attached together back to back and is placed under the heel of the shoe. It is found that IPMC in series produced the voltage of 6.4 V and power of 0.699 W across the load resistance of 2 Omega at walking speed of 2 steps per seconds. From these results, it is concluded that IPMC can be used for energy harvesting application. This work demonstrates the feasibility of IPMC for shoe-based energy harvesting to power wearable sensors.