The research of wearable energy harvesting and storage devices has attracted tremendous attention from researchers with commercial wearable devices emerging in the life as new mainstream. Among them, shoes are a better choice for energy harvesting. However, most of the existing energy harvesting and storage shoes have complex structures, poor wearing comfort, and high cost. In order to solve these problems, a kind of innovative multi-functional shoes is developed and discussed in this paper. The shoe contain two main parts. One is a rubber column used as heel material, which plays a role in cushioning and damping during movement and making the shoe more comfortable to wear. The other one is a circuit system designed to realize energy harvesting, energy storage, and emergency charging of electronic products during walking. The performance test of the rubber column is carried out, and then the structure and geometric size of the rubber column is optimized according to its performance, human weight, and gait. Finally, the stress and energy harvesting of the multi-functional shoes in different gait conditions are analyzed. The analysis results show that the developed innovative multi-functional shoe has good stability and versatility when working under different gait, and the rubber column is beneficial to improve the wearing comfort of energy harvesting shoes.
The main function of innovative multi-functional shoes is to collect electric energy continuously during people's walking process, and at the same time to ensure the comfort of people walking. In order to achieve these functions, the multi-functional shoe mainly consists of the rubber column and the power acquisition device which consists of a linear generator, a storage circuit and a charging interface, as shown in Figure 1. At the heel of the shoe, a ring shaped rubber column is placed inside. And a linear generator is placed at the center of the ring. The solid insole is placed above the rubber column and is directly connected to the rubber column and the movable part of the linear generator.
The insoles can be manufactured according to individual’s ground pressure foot print for increasing the comfort and the output in each step. The people who are in constant travel need a trustable energy source to charge their devices. This invention can prove very useful to the ones who are in remote areas like a village in third world country or in a forest. The present invention has it applications in space industry as it don’t have any moving part and is light in weight unlike other systems of prior art. It will be very effective if someone is on planet mars and need to charge his suits. Well Peizo-electric shoes have a variety of applications in today’s modern world.