The brace can crank up to 20 watts with each step - that means ten minutes of walking can power a laptop for a half hour. (Photo courtesy of Bionic Power, Inc.)
When you think about alternative energy
sources, you probably don’t include people on your
list. But Ann Murray reports that scientists are
tapping into bionic people power:
Transcript
When you think about alternative energy
sources, you probably don’t include people on your
list. But Ann Murray reports that scientists are
tapping into bionic people power:
Today, we really do have bionic technology.
(Opening of the “Six Million Dollar Man”) “Gentleman, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.”
Okay, maybe not to turn you into
the Six Million Dollar Man. But how about a mobile power plant?
Let’s start with the back story.
About 15 years ago, a couple of young
scientists, Doug Weber and Max Donelan, worked together. Donelan wrote
his grad school dissertation on the energy people create when they walk.
He asked Weber, now a biomedical engineer at the University of
Pittsburgh, to run with his idea.
“He approached me with the idea of building a wearable device that could actually harvest
that energy. And not only generate electricity but potentially make it easier
to walk.”
Weber and Donelan put together a rough prototype in his garage. A lab
tested version of their early demo was just published in the journal Science.
The bionic gizmo looks pretty much like a knee brace with a power pack
attached. Weber calls up a video on YouTube to show me how it works. On
the screen, a guy with a brace on each leg is walking on a treadmill.
“With each step he takes on the treadmill power is generated when the
knee is swinging in extension. It’s during that extension phase that we turn
on the generator and as the traces below the video show, generate large
peaks in power.”
Those peaks in power show up as the hamstring muscle “brakes” to keep
the leg from going too far forward. That’s when the bionic brace kicks in. It
grabs that potentially wasted energy and turns it into electricity.
The brace can crank up to 20 watts with each step. That means ten
minutes of walking can power a laptop for a half hour. No other lightweight
people-powered generator can top that.
Yad Garcha’s betting that people
will be intrigued. He’s the CEO of Bionic Power, a company formed to
market the brace. With some product tweaking, he envisions a world of
alternative energy possibilities. Especially for people who have to depend
on batteries or don’t have much access to electricity. His list includes
millions of people in developing countries, amputees, and soldiers.
“It is a green product primarily for the military because of the number of
batteries that they throw away.”
Garcha says, for example, Canadian soldiers carry up to 20 pounds of
disposable batteries.
“And these throw-away batteries cost a lot of money for them to get them into the
theatre or wherever they’re doing their fighting.”
Garcha’s already been talking to Canadian military reps about field tests.
But the brace probably won’t be ready for another year or two. The
prototype still needs to be quieter, lighter, and more efficient before it makes
its way into the hands – or rather, the legs – of consumers. Better move over
Steve Austin!
(“Six Million Dollar Man” theme music)
For The Environment Report, this is Ann Murray.