Development and Analysis of Footstep based Energy Harvester with Improved Piezoelectric Rectifier Module and Interconnection scheme

Piezoelectric energy harvesting has greater potential to partially fullfill the population proportional demand for EV charging, street-lighting, remote village lighting, agriculture water pumps and traffic signals due to increased numbers and dimensions of roads and pavements as well as increased density of vehicles and people. In this work, a 30 cm × 30 cm piezoelectric energy harvesting pressure plate (PEHPP) has been developed which consisted of 9 numbers of piezoelectric rectifier modules (PRMs) of 6 cm × 6 cm × 5 cm. Individual PRM and whole PEHPP were tested with a definite pattern of footstepping action. The Arduino based analogue data acquisition has been done using MATLAB/ simulink. It has been observed that in case of higher density of vehicles, higher capacitance is suitable and in case of lower density of the vehicles or people, lower value of storage capacitance should be connected across the DC terminals of the whole PEHPP unit. The possible energy extraction from 13333 PEHPPs in 1 km long 0.6 m wide pavements in both sides with 500 people passing per hour in 18 hrs is 10.13 kWh, which is sufficient to fully charge 211 Ah, 48 V battery with a constant current of 11.724 A.