Our friends from Soldier Systems have a great post this week on a gadget designed to generate power through kinetic energy.
We’re used to hearing one of the military’s biggest complaints: “we love all the gizmos, it’s just that we hate the short battery life.”
Well, this could be the answer for Joes on the move.
Be sure to read more Soldier Systems content. We’re proud to be partnered with what we believe is the Internet’s best tactical gear news site.
Developed by Tremont Electric based in Cleveland, Ohio the nPower Personal Energy Generator (PEG) is very lightweight, ultra rugged, and completely silent. The PEG weighs a mere nine ounces packed into a nine inch long cylinder that harvests kinetic energy from the human stride and turns it into 2.5 watts of electricity.
The commercial technology has been adapted for military use and undergone limited evaluations by the Army, Marines and a Joint customer. There are currently two militarized versions of the device and they’re developing some additional versions for specialized use. The first version powers a handheld device (ie, a Garmin GPS, iPod, etc) and the other is a backpack-mounted version that can power a Toughbook, a radio, or other tech a warfighter may have. Both of these devices can, in theory, provide power indefinitely, as long as youre moving. Current systems are crafted from Anodized Aluminum but plans are afoot to transition to Carbon Fiber in order to shave weight.
The military handheld device comes in two sizes. The first is nine inches long, nine ounces, and power output at 5 watts and the second is six inches long, weighs seven ounces, and power output at 2.5 watts. It can be mounted to PALS webbing.
Additionally, they have demonstrated a larger backpack mounted laptop device. It is envisioned to be comprised of two larger units running in parallel inside of a dedicated backpack. To work successfully it demands more mass so a minimum load of 30 lbs is required. While it is heavier, it will produce up to 100 watts.
The PEG offers a couple of operational advantages not realized with many other technologies. It is temperature independent so it will work in arctic and desert environments with no modification. Additionally, it has no thermal signature like fuel cells, which means it cannot be detected in the Infrared spectrum.
Tremont Electric was recognized by Business Week as one of America’s most promising start ups.
Visit Tremont Electric for more info. Tremont Electric is represented by Technical Applications Group.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Maybe I’m missing something vital, like constant frequency or something, but is there any reason rows of these couldn’t be run in parallel say, hanging inside the trucks, or even behind a panel?
I think it’s a power to weight thing. It probably takes more fuel to transport the weight of the gizmo than it would to just hook up a generator and make power that way. So it’s utility is really limited to the situations where you don’t have an engine already going. So it would be great for a soldier walking across a field, not so great for a big truck going down the road.
The question will be, how long are the average missions soldiers will go on? Would it be lighter to simply carry extra batteries on the average mission? Or do these things produce enough power that they’re more efficient than carrying an extra battery?
It’s a cool innovation and hopefully will lighten the load of the soldier in the field.
Brian,
Leave it to the soldiers to figure out cool things to do with these things first, then the company will hear the stories and create a better product.
I personally love the potential of this product so much that I want to find if the company has stock that I can buy.
I would bet you could hook it inside a vehicle somehwere, so long as it can sway back and forth.
In addition to figuring out how to increase power output, one needs to meet power generation halfway with increases in electrical efficiency.
Realistically how many appliances can one charge? Perhaps the best way to approach renewables would be to develop solar panels kept on base and used to recharge Li-Pol batteries, versus attempting to figure out means to parcel out power generation in smaller packages, with concomitant inefficiencies.
Private! Go take another lap around the block. I want to listen to my tunes….
Man they took my line. I always tell my old lady to jiggle it and it will play all day long (or 55 seconds as the case may be). LOL
DC2
Because it would be inefficient. A more efficient way would be to simply hook the devices up to the truck’s battery.
Kinetic devices tend to have ~1-2% efficiency, if I recall correctly. I think their website gives the numbers…
maybe you could hang these from the rear view mirror of a MRAP
maybe you could hang these from the rear view mirror of a MRAP
This sounds like it could be great if it absorbs energy from the downward but not the upward motion of the legs. A shock absorber that recharges batteries.
This has existed for a while in the form of LED torches that you “shake” and they have enough energy to work for a short period of time.
A lot of mass for what it does… but then again, if the idea is to take it on a very long trek, it makes sense, since you only need the existing rechargable battery and this…not multiple batteries.
It’s a compromise, but a simple effective idea.
What would be even better is to work a recharging system of some kind into the electronics themselves: So a NVG would have a small recharging device built in, and as you moved about it would recharge the NVG battery. Same with a Javelin CLU, etc.
Designing recharging into the equipment itself reduces the amount of apparent things someone must carry, and hopefully means the designers can optimize recharging capability to the intended device.
“Designing recharging into the equipment itself reduces the amount of apparent things someone must carry, and hopefully means the designers can optimize recharging capability to the intended device.”
Yeah, except when the DoD has to put out contracts for all new stuff with this tech in it, just another reason for the next administration to cancel it, saving millions at the expense of billions.
OK, once again, it sounds great, but isn’t that impressive. COME ON people (I’m talking to the writers here mostly), do some frickin’ math. Yes, math.
Assuming you believe their numbers (my experience has been to divide the reported power output of these things in half to get what you’ll really get)… but let’s use their optimistic numbers:
9oz gets you 5W (watts), assuming you’re walking. Thus, you have to walk one hour continuously to get 5Wh (watt-hours).
A CR-123 cell (the surefire batteries) have roughly 4.2Wh in a 0.6oz package. One of their devices is a weight equivalent to 11.6 CR-123 batteries. That means that to “break even” in your carried load you’d have to walk continuously for 49 hours!
Now, even assuming you’re super hooah and are marching for 15 hours CONTINUOUSLY per day, that means you’re going over three days without resupply just to break even on carried load. And if you’re going without resupply, that you’re carrying all your food, water, etc. Really?
OK, so unless it’s been years since you’ve done a real field problem, it should be clear at this point that this thing is operationally useless. But it’s actually worse than this. Because either you’re now also carrying an adapter cable to tie it directly into your device (more extra weight, walk another day or so to break even), or you’re using it to recharge a battery in your pack. Except that battery charging is about 80% efficient, so now you’re losing another 20% of your energy to get it in the same form as your CR-123s. That means you get to walk four or more days to break even. Four days without any resupply. Right. SF SR teams, RARELY. LRSD teams, even more rarely. Oh, and when those guys are out for 5 days without resupply, they’re not walking. They’re in a hide site sitting super still.
Look, I love the green tech revolution as much as the next guy, but this is pure folly. This is junior high school level math to figure out this is not a good deal. Do. The. Math.
Oh, and the people above who suggested hooking to a vehicle/generator instead: they’re right on. Diesel/JP8 makes a CR-123 look like a lead weight in comparison.
The “shaky battery charger” idea has been around for awhile. Most recently via M2Epower that also targeted the military (www.redherring.com/Home/23168). The technology is nearly the same (peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:M2E_Power). But it suffered from some real problems – limited output power (www.nanostring.net/M2E/M2E_Study.pdf).
To compete with carried batteries, you need to be able to generate 10+ watt-hours of energy daily. With as little disruption as possible.
Human-generated power is a great idea. Thinking that you can get it without real physical effort is dreaming. 20-30W in a modern handcrank is possible, 100-200W in a bike-powered one. So forget about barely-noticeable gadgets miraculously charging all your electronic gear.
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Susan
http://carusbcharger.com
The affect this product will have on the electronic world is large. It will give us a slightly greater excuse to consume time messing around on the cyberspace. I would be tempted to purchase the ipod if it cleaned up my room and did my wash!