Development of impact-based piezoelectric road energy harvester for practical application

Many researches with regard to piezoelectric energy harvesting from pressure exerted by passing cars have been conducted. In this paper, an impact-based road energy harvester as buried-type is developed with the method that the piezoelectric device is deformed directly by the pressure due to passing cars. Based on this, the developed road energy harvester is made to the size of 30 × 30 × 9 cm3. The performance of this new road energy harvester is measured with UTM (Universal Testing Machine) and MMLS3 (Third-scale Model Mobile Load Simulator) which can apply loads similar to the actual traffic loads to the harvester in lab-scale. Finally, the buried harvester is experimented with APT (Accelerated Pavement Testing).