Preliminary Model of Energy Harvesting through Prosthetics

Abstract

The goal of the paper is to harvest energy through the flexing of a piezoelectric unit in a prosthetic limb. Depending upon the flex of the sensor, it produces a voltage output. To embed this in a forearm prosthetic, a piezoelectric sensor can be attached to the hinge joint. Hence, the more it moves, the more voltage output is produced. In this paper, a prosthetic limb is modeled as a physical pendulum. The experiment done includes a voltmeter, a physical pendulum, and a piezoelectric sensor attached to the axis. Due to the formula breakdown into a 2-parameter model, the chi-squared analysis on the formula is much simpler. Hence, the author could fit the model to the data and the best fit values were found.