Week 1 - Project Status

This week we finalized our group roster to five people, who all happen to be ME undergrads. We all wanted to pick a project pertaining to energy, particularly renewable energy. With so many electronic devices being a part of our normal everyday lives in today’s day and age, we have noticed a problem with always having to charge these devices. The battery capacity in many modern smartphones and laptops is becoming quite substantial, but over the course of the average college student’s work week it seems like the energy is depleted rapidly on a near daily basis.

Our team would like to develop a product that solves this problem of drained batteries in an “off the grid” manner, so that the consumer never needs to worry about running out of juice when he/she is on the go. The device would remain in the consumer’s handbag or backpack and have the ability to harness kinetic, renewable energy through the motion of walking to trickle charge a high-capacity battery. The whole idea is not to replace a conventional AC wall outlet, but to offer a power boost in times of dire need and be capable of high wattage output. Hand crank devices have been on the market for years but are usually only capable of producing on the order of 5-10 watts, which will not charge a laptop. Many Apple chargers output 60 watts to charge their line of smaller MacBook Pros.

Before taking the plunge into trying to create a new niche charging product, the team needs to conduct a full patent search to be sure a similar idea is not protected already. After some preliminary online searches, no such product has been on the market for sale that can harness enough kinetic energy from walking to charge laptops. Most of these commercial devices can’t generate electricity without first being charged themselves from AC power. More preliminary research is essential before we try to start engineering a product, as is a consumer survey to see if this truly is a problem for consumers.