Costs of Campaign Stops, Using Wood Pulp To Generate Energy Beneath Your Feet, Designing Your Life

Air Date:
Heard On Central Time

Many candidates and their surrogates visited Wisconsin in the primary and general election seasons. But some Wisconsin towns got stuck with unpaid bills for security and more. Imagine generating energy just by walking on floorboards. We talk to a researcher studying the potential of wood pulp — a new source of bio-energy. A design expert who worked for Apple joins us to share insights about how you can use elements of design to build success into your lifestyle.

Featured in this Show

  • Candidate Visits Leave Municipalities With Unpaid Bills

    Wisconsin saw many candidates and campaign surrogates visit the state leading oup to last week’s election. But several municipalities are having difficulty getting campaigns to reimburse them for security and other costs.

  • Renewable Energy Beneath Your Feet

    There could be a new way to make the ground beneath your feet more eco-friendly — by developing flooring that converts energy from human footsteps. We talk to a UW-Madison engineering professor about the latest prototype.

  • Powerful Steps Forward: UW Researchers Convert Footsteps Into Energy

    Between the stadium lights, flashing scoreboard and pulsing sound system, a football game sucks up vast amounts of energy. But what if spectators at the next Badgers game, by their mere presence, generated enough electricity to power the entire event?

    University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers say this is not as far-fetched as it seems. UW-Madison professor Xudong Wang and a team of researchers have discovered a way to produce electricity from human footsteps.

    Wang, an associate professor in UW-Madison’s material science and engineering department, has developed wooden flooring that can capture the vibration of footsteps and convert it into energy.

    The technology centers on what’s called triboelectricity, an electric charge generated by friction like the static from winter clothing. By taking wood pulp – a plentiful, cheap waste product – and treating some of its fibers with a chemical process, the researchers are able to alter its properties to generate an electrical charge.

    “We’re looking at material that is cheap, cost-effective, eco-friendly, recyclable,” which means the technology could be easily applicable to the general public, Wang said.

    He said there’s no difference between walking on a regular floor and one that’s triboelectrically charged.

    “It’s still the same floor we walk on every day,” Wang said. “The only difference … is that we use a chemical process to treat the wood fiber to change the electric property of the fiber. Then we put them together (and) leave a very tiny space between them, so they will have some contact and generate electricity.”

    The energy generated can easily be captured and stored for different applications simply by attaching a rechargeable battery, Wang said.

    He said a 1-square-foot wood panel prototype he designed generates about 30 volts and can light up more than 30 LED lights at the same time. His team hopes to recreate these results on a larger scale to use the technology in places with high-volume foot traffic to generate energy just from people walking by.

    Of course, this type of so-called “roadside energy harvesting” depends on how many people walk over these electrically charged floorboards. That’s where sporting events become an attractive option.

    “We did a quick calculation based on our Badger football stadium,” Wang said. “Given a capacity of 80,000 people, if we put one block on each seat and (get) one step from each person, they probably will be able to light up more than 100 high-energy lights in the stadium.”

  • How To Design The Life You Want

    Two design experts join us to tell us how to use principles of design to plan, choose and build our own best lives. Part of the secret, according to our guests, is building instead of thinking our way forward. We’ll talk with the authors of the book ‘Designing Your Life.’

Episode Credits

  • Rob Ferrett Host
  • Veronica Rueckert Host
  • Judith Siers-Poisson Producer
  • Haleema Shah Producer
  • Marika Suval Producer
  • Veronica Rueckert Producer
  • Doug Schneider Guest
  • Xudong Wang Guest
  • Bill Burnett Guest
  • Dave Evans Guest

Related Stories