COEP students design a environment-friendly mobile charger ‘Walk-n-Charge’
Sakaal Times: In the near future, a twenty-minute walk could be all you need to recharge your cell phone for a day’s usage. In an innovation that could be of immense benefit to rural areas and defence personnel besides being environment friendly, Tejas Narasimhan and Isha Nag, third year and final year students respectively of the College of Engineering, Pune have designed a mobile charger, which can be used to charge the batteries of low-powered devices like mobile phones, MP3 players and GPS devices.
Here it is how it works. Imagine a plastic can be sealed with a small dynamo and a pulley inside it with a metal string strapped on one foot like a blood pressure belt. The string is attached to a clip on the other foot. So every time you walk, the string contracts and expands due to the movement of your leg, which in turn moves the dynamo inside to produce small charges of electricity. This charge is passed on to a circuit box, which contains two replaceable batteries. From the replaceable batteries the power is passed on to the mobile phone or any other device that might be on charge.
“We started out almost a year ago and this is currently our fourth prototype. We were motivated by thinking of people in rural areas and defence personnel in hostile terrain. They don’t have electricity and few means of communication. They need to use mobile phones. Walking is pretty much a necessity in these areas and just twenty minutes of walking is enough to charge your mobile phone for a day,” says Tejas Narsimhan.
Speaking about their innovation, Isha Nag, says, “There are many mobile chargers in the market but they are not safe. Ours is the safest and the charge supplied here is similar to electricity from a grid supply.”
The students are high on motivation after their device won the first prize in the IIT Tech Fest in January and both have found mentors under the Bhau Institute of Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Leadership where Isha is already a student and Tejas will be joining next year.
The device is in the prototyping stage but students are hopeful of producing a commercial version by the beginning of next year. “We are trying to make it more compact and a single unit rolled into one. Also it has to be aesthetically appealing,” says Isha.
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