Tremont Electric’s first product, the nPower PEG, has faced challenges in the production process, but is poised to change the way we think about generating renewable energy.
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Aaron LeMieux, CEO and founder of Tremont Electric, says the idea for harvesting kinetic energy first occurred to him while he was a mechanical and bio-medical engineering student backpacking 1,500 miles on the Appalachian Trail in 1996. |
Ten years after first thinking about how to harvest kinetic energy, Aaron LeMieux had a basement laboratory and a rough prototype of a passive kinetic energy charger, but in order to move forward, he had to get his wife on board.
“I said, ‘Honey, I think I’ve got a really good idea and I think it’s patentable. I’d like to empty out our savings account and give it to the patent attorney and quit my job so I can do this full time. I don’t know when I’ll have a paycheck, but I think this alternative energy area is going to get pretty big,’” LeMieux recalls.
His wife agreed, and within months LeMieux had filed the first patent application on nPower technology.
Four years later, LeMieux is the CEO and founder of Tremont Electric in Cleveland, Ohio, a company built around nPower kinetic energy harvesting. The company’s first product, the nPower PEG, has faced challenges in the production process, but is poised to change the way we think about generating renewable energy.Light Bulb Moment
LeMieux says the idea for harvesting kinetic energy first occurred to him while he was a mechanical and bio-medical engineering student backpacking 1,500 miles on the Appalachian Trail in 1996.
“I had a 40-pound backpack that had a lot of kinetic energy, but I was stopping in towns to purchase batteries so I’d have electrical energy,” says LeMieux. “Walking 1,500 miles gives you a lot of time to think, and what I thought about was how to convert this excess of kinetic energy into the electrical energy I needed.”
When he returned to the University of Toledo, LeMieux began work on a rudimentary prototype, but the project was “an absolute, stunning failure.”
“The thing didn’t work any way that I expected it too; it was bad,” LeMieux says.
Despite the setback, LeMieux kept the idea in the back of his head, pondering what went wrong and how he might be able to make it work. Over the next 10 years, LeMieux says he bumped into a lot of different technologies, which helped him come up with the missing pieces of the puzzle.LeMieux filed the first patent for nPower technology in 2007; founded Tremont Electric in 2008; and unveiled a working prototype of the first product using nPower technology, the NPower PEG, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2009.
Harvesting Kinetic Energy
nPower is a vibration harvesting technology that makes power using Faraday’s law of induction: the induced electromotive force (EMF) in any closed circuit is equal to the time rate of change of the magnetic flux through the circuit.
More simply, nPower technology harvests kinetic energy from large energy, small frequency forces like walking, wind, and waves. The electrical output is directly correlated with the physical size of the device.
“We have a magnet that likes to bounce around a lot as an input energy source,” explains LeMieux. “When we tune the mass and the springs correctly and stick it on a human – people tend to move around at 2 hertz
– we can take off power, store it, and recharge a mobile electronic device.”
The nPower PEG (Personal Energy Generator) is Tremont Electric’s first commercial product using nPower technology. The device is a backup battery charger for consumer electronics that gathers energy from walking, running, or biking. The 9” tall device weights 11 ounces and is contained in a titanium casing. As users go about daily activities, the nPower PEG continually tops off the internal, 1,000 mAh lithium polymer battery.The nPower PEG is a universal charger that connects to handheld devices with an iGo cable, which uses varying tips to connect with over 3,000 different devices. The targeted customer base for the product includes early tech adopters, outdoor enthusiasts, college students, and sustainability-minded citizens.
Hand-Made Prototypes
The first prototypes for the nPower PEG were built by hand, a process that involved finding the correct-sized tubes, magnets, and springs to make the device work.
“One of the nice parts about working on the size of the device at that time is you can get in there and change things – you can move plastic around, you can machine things really simply. You’re not dealing with very tight tolerances,” explains LeMieux. “There was a lot of hand manipulation … that went along with the very first generation of prototypes.”
As the concept became clearer – and the startup received more funds – LeMieux and the team began using better machining facilities and computing tools like MatLab to test the energy algorithms.
“If I had any advice for engineers, it would be prototype as quickly as possible and see what it does,” LeMieux reflects. “That was one of the keys to getting this technology to where it’s at – we’re always prototyping, moving things along, and doing things as rapidly as we possibly can.”
Sustainability is Key
One of Tremont Electric’s most important values is sustainability. In keeping with that goal, LeMieux says 90 percent of the components for the nPowerPEG are sourced from companies in Ohio, which helps the product maintain a small carbon footprint. In choosing where to source products from, the company added a measure of distance from where components are manufactured to keep the supply chain small.
“From day one, I always viewed nPower as an industry-making technology rather than a company-making technology,” says LeMieux. “By being able to rely on vendors and suppliers that are close to us, we’re helping to build an ecosystem that’s going to be able to allow us to develop new products in the future from our technology.”
“Because we’re trying to concentrate everything in one relatively close location, everybody knows who we are and everybody wants to supply us,” he continues.
Additionally, keeping suppliers close allows LeMieux to communicate easily during a rapid product development process. Rather than getting on an airplane to discuss technical details, LeMieux can drive across town to solve problems like a circuit board component placed the wrong direction.
“It’s a lot easier to be able to jump in the car, drive over there, and point to where the problem is and what needs to be fixed,” LeMieux says.
Shipping Problems
Tremont Electric started selling and shipping the nPower PEG in the summer of 2010, but shortly after the launch discovered a problem with a component on the circuit board that needed to be fixed. As a result, the company was forced to shut down their online store and ask customers to patient while the manufacturing issue was addressed.
“If somebody else owned our manufacturing process, it could have killed our company,” LeMieux says. “But since we’re the ones who own the process, we’re able to work with our vendors to take care of problems and get back manufacturing as soon as possible.”
As of March 2011, the company was preparing to reinitiate manufacturing on the device and begin taking orders from a reservation list of a couple thousand people.
Energy of the Future
Because nPower technology is based on the idea of making electric energy where you need it, off the electric grid, LeMieux sees a number of future applications.
“Anything that goes up and down, side to side, or back and forth that has a battery inside it now can be replaced with nPower. It means that there are a lot of different things we can do with it,” he says.
The next project is an nPower wave energy converter, which will upsize the current technology to the size of a car and encapsulate it in a buoy on the water to harvest wave energy from the ocean or the Great Lakes near Tremont Electric’s office.“nPower is going to be the alternative energy inside of your devices,” says LeMieux. “It’s the technology that’s operating in the background that enables not just current applications like cell phones and mobile devices, but also all of these wonderful new applications that would be enabled by mobile power sources.”
For more information, visit www.npowerpeg.com.