School project: shoes that produce energy

[jufo2014]

Hello together,

we are working on a project on energy production in connection with shoes. That means, we want to manufacture a shoe that you can use to load a battery.
Our model is a pocket lamp that you have to shake to make it flash.
Now we want to know how to build in a capacitator to stabilise votage. How you may have noticed we aren't experts in physics. Maybe someone can support us by drawing a wiring diagram...Our aim is to store the produced energy.

Sorry for our English but we aren't native speakers.

Thank you in advance..

 

[berkeman]

Hello together,

we are working on a project on energy production in connection with shoes. That means, we want to manufacture a shoe that you can use to load a battery.
Our model is a pocket lamp that you have to shake to make it flash.
Now we want to know how to build in a capacitator to stabilise votage. How you may have noticed we aren't experts in physics. Maybe someone can support us by drawing a wiring diagram...Our aim is to store the produced energy.

Sorry for our English but we aren't native speakers.

Thank you in advance..

Welcome to the PF.

We are not allowed to do your schoolwork for you here. Please show us what you have done so far. What mechanisms have you considered? Have you looked at the literature on "energy harvesting"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_harvesting

.

 

[BiGyElLoWhAt]

Well, one thing to get you started, you could look up emf, as it sounds like that's what you're working with. Also look up capacitor banks.

 

[jufo2014]

Good evening!
We have already built a copy of these pocket lamps I described.

(there is a magnet moving in the tube)
We also work together wirh a company in Switzerland that helps us producing the spool we need. Now we want to store the produced energy. But how?
What does the abbreviation emf stand for?

 

[BiGyElLoWhAt]

electro motive force, but it's not actually a force. It's what makes the current from the magnet moving inside the spool. And you know you could just wind yourself a spool, right?

If the flux changes, an emf will be induced. There are therefore three ways an emf can be induced in a loop:

Change the magnetic field
Change the area of the loop
Change the angle between the field and the loop
Faraday's law of induction
We'll move from the qualitative investigation of induced emf to the quantitative picture. As we have learned, an emf can be induced in a coil if the magnetic flux through the coil is changed. It also makes a difference how fast the change is; a quick change induces more emf than a gradual change. This is summarized in Faraday's law of induction. The induced emf in a coil of N loops produced by a change in flux in a certain time interval is given by:

$emf = -N\frac{\Delta \phi}{\Delta t}$

Recalling that the flux through a loop of area A is given by

$\phi = \vec{B} \cdot \vec{A}$

Faraday's law can be written:

$emf = -N\frac{\Delta (\vec{B} \cdot \vec{A})}{\Delta t}$

I took that excerpt from http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/py106/InducedEMF.html

This is the physics behind what you're doing. I would recommend reading more into it, and probably looking into the engineering side of it.

Also: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=storing+Voltage&l=1

 

[jufo2014]

Yes, of course we know that we can wind a spool ourselves. We have already done it like you can see on the picture I've sent.
Ahh...yes we have done all this about induction in physics and we also worked with capacitators there. But there is a big difference between theory, using formulaes and really build sth with induction and capacitators. Because of that we wrote in this forum!
Today we talked to our teacher who told us sth about a rectifier...Do you think this will help us by storing our electricity on a battery?

 

[jufo2014]

Anybody there who wants to help us?