The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia going to be putting some big money toward a shirt for soldiers to wear that will scavenge and store energy.
It is good to see some federally funded efforts again, hopefully they'll have more success than we did here in the states. But it looks like what they're doing is a new direction that what's been done in the past decade -- that's generating/scavenging energy and then storing it on the body.
It will be interesting to see how efficiently the transducers will be able scavenge energy from the soldier's movement -- we probably all remember the whole "heel-strike PZT" debacle from a few years ago.
But I think there is reason to be optimistic; new nanotechnology is enabling scavenging with nanowires that may prove to offer a more efficient means of drawing power (if it can be scaled). Let's just hope that at the end of the day it actually decreases the amount of weight these soldier's have to carry -- not just distribute the load...
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