Development of a Suspended Backpack for Harvesting Biomechanical Energy

Abstract

In this study, a harvesting device embedded into a suspended backpack was developed to harness part of a human's biomechanical energy and reduce dynamic force of the backpack on the carrier. The harvester utilized a spring mass damping system to translate the human body's vertical movement during walking into the rotation of a gear train, which then drives rotary generators to produce electricity. A prototype was built to examine the theoretical study, which showed that the experimental tests agreed with the simulation. Compared with previous work, the harvester in this work had a 40% higher harvesting energy efficiency.

Wearable Biomechanical Energy Harvesting Technologies

“…The MMR uses a rack gear and one-way bearing to convert bi-directional body movements to unidirectional rotation of the generator. Thus, under the same conditions as those in [41], this device exhibits an increased output of 4.8 W.…”

“…Devices based on this technique generate significantly higher power than those based on other techniques. As can be inferred from Table 5, with such devices, it is possible to harvest energy by using the center-of-gravity movement of the upper body, the foot-strike, lower limb movement, and knee joint motion is possible, and watt-level power can be generated at normal walking speed [1,[40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48].…”

“…However, this harvester has a high TCOH value [46] because of its large moving mass; thus, it is effective when a large load is originally required. Xie et al [41] further optimized the backpack energy-harvesting mechanism. For a higher power generation, two pairs of a rack gear and generator were used.…”

“…Energy harvesting principles for mechanical kinetic energy include piezoelectric [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21], triboelectric [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31], and electromagnetic energy harvesting [1,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48], as shown in Figure 1. Electromagnetic generators can be categorized into two types, namely inertial induction [32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] and gear-and-generator [1,…”

Wave Tank Testing of a Pendulum Wave Energy Converter 1:12 Scale Model

“…The device is called PeWEC (Pendulum Wave Energy Converter) and does not need to be powered to produce inertial effect, so here it is referred as to "passive" device [Rinaldi et al, 2015]. The "passive" device still maintains the advantages derived from the allenclosed architecture, typical of the inertial harvesters [French, 2006;Trimble et al, 2010;Xie and Cai, 2015].…”