Green energy harvesting from human footsteps

Abstract

The need for a sustainable green energy is increasing, while the availability of energy itself is not comparable to the needs. One of the most rapid activities in human life is footstepping. The large amounts of kinetic energy in term of pressure force are generated in every footstep activities at the crosswalk space, lecture building, office, shopping centre or market area. As an alternative energy that still has not been exploited, these human steps can be used to power some low voltage loads. In this study, a tile constructed with some piezoelectric transducers are designed and implemented to generate electrical pulses and harvesting human feet step energies. The piezoelectric transducers used in this study is Lead Zirconate Titanate type. From the pizoelectric floor energy harvester system, a tile consists of 20 pieces parallel connected piezoelectric transducer can produce AC voltage up to 71.20 V. While the average generated voltage is 63.98 V. So the average power is 0.0604 watt/10 footsteps. We conclude that this piezoelectric generator can be generated more power when arranged with some tiles arrangement, so we can harvest this energy efficiently.