The idea of using human movement to generate electricity is something we’ve seen applied to many areas, including footwear, roads and, just this week, motion-powered mesh that heals injured tendons. Among these possibilities is flooring that can generate energy to power electronics, and ETH Zurich scientists have now developed a highly efficient form of this technology and demonstrated its capabilities by powering a lamp with footsteps.

We’ve looked at a number of innovative flooring solutions that can generate electricity from human movement over the years, including tiles for both indoor and outdoor use and spongey wood that relies on the piezoelectric effect to generate a voltage under mechanical stress. This new example has some similarities to another we looked at back in 2016, where scientists embedded cellulose nanofibers in wooden flooring to generate an electric charge as they vibrate through what’s known as the triboelectric effect.

The triboelectric effect, of which static electricity is a good example, sees certain materials create an electrical charge when separated from a different material, like a sock being pulled apart from a fresh shirt it is clinging to when you pull it out of the dryer. This phenomenon also forms the basis of the new smart wooden flooring, which consists of two veneers of treated wood with electrodes layered underneath. But bringing the performance up to the desired levels involved some tinkering to address the limited ability of wood to generate electricity.

“Wood is basically triboneutral,” says senior author of the study Guido Panzarasa. “It means that wood has no real tendency to acquire or to lose electrons. So the challenge is making wood that is able to attract and lose electrons.”

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