Design and Modelling of Piezoelectric Road Energy Harvesting

Abstract

In recent years, road piezoelectric energy harvesting (RPEH) has attracted great attention from industry and academia, as it can provide power to traffic ancillary facilities and low-power wireless sensor devices to support car networking and intelligent transportation. The output power of RPEH in a recent research project demonstrated a watt level RPEH. In this proposal, we propose to harvest energy from piezoelectric modules (also called stacks) to power selected highways, tolls, and bridges in Pennsylvania. The project incorporates electrical, mechanical, and civil engineering works. The proposed smart highway RPEH will be conducted using optimization parameters to evaluate the system performance and trade-offs. MATLAB will be used with other optimization solvers in problem modeling and optimization. During this project, an RPEH hardware system will be constructed. The system will include a piezoelectric module, rectifier (AC-DC), Storage battery, data acquisition system (DAQ), and computer. The captured data will be analyzed using MATLAB/Simulink. The results show that optimum harvested parameters were addressed when the thickness is selected as 2 mm.