Design and Optimal Placement of PVDF Patches Over a Shoe Transducer for Efficient Energy Harvesting

Abstract

The conception of harvesting renewable energy from the routine movements of the human body itself has been proved as a nonstop energy source for portable electronic gadgets and thus enabling these devices working continuously without any need for conventional batteries. This paper gets its theme from the idea of developing such transducer devices which can be used as a real-time power source for our handy rechargeable devices. A shoe transducer based on the fundamentals of piezoelectricity has been tested for its capabilities of harvesting the energy from the walking load of a human body and thus transmitting power to portable devices. The analysis has been done by mounting the piezoelectric patches on different locations in the shoe sole and shoe base for energy harvesting using real-time Labview software. Matlab7.11.0 (R2010b) has also been used to take various graphical responses. The concluding observations proved that different locations of polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) piezo patch in the shoe transducer give classified outputs and thus to obtain maximum output, it should be placed optimally at the point of strain concentration. It has also been analyzed that a human with a normal body weight of 60kg can even generate sufficient voltage to power the battery of 4.7 Wh in a routine walk of 1300 steps. It was found that an average of 5.1170 V can be extracted from the device by placing the patches in a parallel combination inside shoe sole, which was further improved to an average of 9.4866 V (increased by 85.4%), by placing them at shoe base.