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Procedia Engineering 47 (2012) 877 881

Proc. Eurosensors XXVI, September 9-12, 2012, Krakw, Poland

Design, Fabrication and Test of a Polymer Air Driven

Microturbine for Micropower Generation
Christiane Dettelbachera, Wolf-Gerrit Frha, Wenmiao Shua,a*,
a
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton Campus, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS, UK

Abstract

A microturbine is developed for harnessing energy from an airflow, which is generated by body motion. The energy
should get transformed into usable electrical energy and thus provided for powering portable electrical devices. The
turbine is flown axial and rotates in the same direction independent of the incoming airflow. Different designs of the
turbine are tested and opposed to figure out the best parameters. For the best turbine, the integration and the process
of walking is simulated.
2012 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of the Symposium Cracoviense

Sp.2012 Published
z.o.o. Open by Elsevier
access under Ltd.license.
CC BY-NC-ND

Keywords: Energy harvesting; Micropower-Generation; Microturbine

1. Introduction

Caused by the progressive development of new technologies, humankind gets more reliant on energy
supply for wearable electric devices. Unfortunately, with the new requirements of microprocessors,
memory storage and the proceeding of microfabrication, the development of the energy density of the
batteries is not increasing as fast as the energy demand of portable electrical devices. Wearable energy
harvesting devices can provide a solution. The concept considered here is based on generating air flow by
body motion. This airflow is used to run a microturbine.

2. Motivation

The intention is to design a turbine for a wearable energy harvesting system. These devices can be
used for powering portable electrics. For the comfort of the user, the light-weight and the

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +0-000-000-0000 ; fax: +0-000-000-0000 .

E-mail address: author@institute.xxx .

1877-7058 2012 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of the Symposium Cracoviense
Sp. z.o.o. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
doi:10.1016/j.proeng.2012.09.287
878 Christiane Dettelbacher et al. / Procedia Engineering 47 (2012) 877 881

microfabrication of the device is very important. This is the incentive of manufacturing a turbine which
can be miniaturized to different sizes. Therefore the simplicity of the design is essential.

3. Design Principle of Microturbines

The turbine is manufactured of PMMA to make it light weight and suitable for laser cutting. The parts
of the turbine can easily be manufactured from 2D layers.
Figure 2: Different designs of the turbine (design 1, 2, 3

and 4 from the left to the right side)

Figure 1: Assembly of the five discs building the turbine

The turbine consists of five discs one middle disc and each two front and channel discs. The discs are
disposed like shown in Figure 1. The turbine is driven by compressed air, which gets harnessed by body
motion. The air streams axial to the shaft on the turbine and enters the turbine by inlet slots. There the air
gets directed into the channels. These channels are curved, so that the airflow changes its direction by
90. Thus the air leaves the turbine angular, so that the turbine gets a thrust in the opposite direction. The
turbine is built symmetrically with the symmetry axis through the middle disc. So the same phenomenon
occurs, when the air flows from the opposite side in the turbine. The turbine rotates in the same direction
independent of the incoming airflow. Due to its simple design, unlike other turbines with rotor blades, the
turbine can be miniaturized to very small sizes. The prototype of the turbine has a diameter of 20 mm.

4. Experimental Results

The different designs are compared by running a generator and measuring the output voltage.
 Christiane Dettelbacher et al. / Procedia Engineering 47 (2012) 877 881 879

Figure 1: Comparison of the four designs Figure 2: Technical drawing of the

turbine with the best results

Parameters are varied, like the shape of the channels, thicknesses of the discs, the weight and the size
of the inlet slots on the front disc. Thus the turbine is optimized to a certain design. Figure shows four
different designs for the channel disc. In

these four turbines are compared to each other for different distances between the turbine and the air
tube.
The technical drawing of the turbine with the best results (turbine 4) is shown in
. For this design, further tests are performed. The pressure stated is overpressure. Tests are performed
with compressed air. With a supply pressure of 20 psi, a rotation velocity up to 6600 is reached. Different
supply pressures are used to run the turbine. With the pressure transformed from psi into Pa and the
measured volume flow of the air, the input power is calculated with Pin = p * Q. With different
resistances connected to the generator, the output voltage is measured. Thus the output power is
calculated for each measuring point by using Pel = U2/R. Output powers for different resistances are
stated in Figure 5a. Figure 5b shows the related efficiencies. To get the efficiency, the output power is
divided by the input power = Pel/Pin.

40 5 psi 0.2 5 psi

output power [mW]

efficiency [%]

30 7,5 psi 0.15 7.5 psi

20 10 psi 0.1 10 psi

10 12,5 psi 0.05 12.5 psi

15 psi 15psi
0 0
1.E+00 1.E+04 1.E+08 17,5 psi 1 10000
100000000 17.5 psi
])
log10(Resistance [ 20 psi log10(Resistance []) 20 psi

(a) (b)

Figure 5: (a) Generated power and; (b) Efficiency of the turbine as a function of resistance and supply pressure
880 Christiane Dettelbacher et al. / Procedia Engineering 47 (2012) 877 881

5. Integrated Micropower Generation for Harnessing Power from Walking

The turbine is intended to be integrated in wearable energy harvesting devices. Under the shoe
respectively in the sole of the shoe is a chamber filled with air. At each step, the chamber gets compressed
by the force of the body weight and thus the air gets pressed out of the chamber and directed on the
turbine. Within the following test fast walking is simulated by using a bike pump. The generator is
connected to a resistance of 3250 (optimal load resistance for these conditions) and parallel to an
oscilloscope. Thus the voltage over a period of 9 seconds is recorded.

20

10
Voltage [V]

0
0 2 4 6 8 10
-10

-20
Time [s]
Figure 6: Output voltage over a time period
Figure 6 shows the measuring points of voltage as a function of the time. Using the formula P = U2/R
the power is calculated for each recorded measuring point. The average power over the whole process of
walking is 4.71 mW.
Piezoelectric technology is a widely used method to transform the energy from walking into useful
electrical power. Table 1 shows the power with regard to the required footprint area that can get generated
by the microturbine stated here, opposed to vibration piezoelectric.

Table 1: Results of energy transformation with the microturbine compared to the piezoelectric energy transformation

Energy transformation Diameter [cm] Area [cm2] Power [mW] Power/Area [mW/cm2]
Vibration piezoelectric [1] 17 3 7 * 10-3
Microturbine blown in one direction 2 3.14 4.71 1.499
Microturbine blown in both directions 2 3.14 9.42 2.999
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6. Conclusion

A novel design of a turbine is presented, which can be scaled down to micron sizes because of its
simple design. As the turbine consists of 2D-layers, it can easily manufactured by laser-cutting
techniques. We show here that this microturbine energy can be harnessed from human walking motion.
The required area is lower than the one which is necessary to generate the same power from piezoelectric
elements.

References

[1] Dewei Jia, Jing Liu. Human power-based energy harvesting strategies for mobile electronic devices , China: Higher
Education Press and Springer-Verlag; 2009, p. 11

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the sponsorship from EPSRC (EP/J501335/1) for the project.