Wearable energy harvesting technologies will become an everyday part of future portable electronic devices. By generating the energy where the energy is needed and not relying on a main power source to recharge the portable devices battery, wearable energy harvesters will enable future generations to have even more freedoms, travel further, and never run low on battery again. This will reduce the energy consumption of the mains grid and thus in turn reduce CO² emissions generated by this traditional power source making this research important for the whole plant. This research project aims to take another step towards in helping the development of future technologies by investigating novel wearable energy harvesting designs and showing ability to charge current portable electronic devices such as smart phones and tables. This required research into a broad range of topics including, energies from humans, energy conversion mechanisms, the movement of people and the power demands for charging current portable electronic devices. Background research in the human energy levels and how research to date had gone about exacting different energy sources in different ways was the starting point for this research. This leads on to a more detailed look into the exaction methods and optimization of footfall energy harvester designs. Looking into the human gait cycle gave the information required to replicate human footfall motion for use in scientific experiments. From this background research, two bespoke designs of wearable energy harvester have been created. The first novel design showed a promising way of extracting footfall energy and converting it into useable electrical energy producing Watt-Level of power. The second design is an evolution of the first design but expands the extraction method to both feet and relocated the main harvester unit into a backpack worn by the user. The improved design incorporates a novel approach to energy conversion method by introducing a mechanical energy storage system before transduction into electrical energy. This is shown to increased electrical power output from footfall energy, reduced energy consumption of the wearer and is shown to truly be able to charge current portable electronics. The improved design is shown to produce 2.6 Watts average power from normal walking. The experimental set ups, procedures, and their results are shown throughout this thesis. These experimental results are confirmed by using the wearable energy harvesters on a treadmill at the three main walking speeds showing their real-world capabilities. To demonstrate the wearable energy harvester deigns shown in this research project were truly able to charge current portable technologies, endurance testing was also performed. This confirms the harvesters were able to work for longer periods of time. This longer time frame is needed for the charging times of the current portable devices. After researching into wearable energy harvesting from over the last 20 years it was a struggle to compare all the different forms, designs, types and power outputs. It became clear that the existing methods were unable to provide a clear picture of harvester’s scalability, changeability and useability for future design ideas. This is why a new form of comparison was created and is shown to have strong benefits over the existing methods
