Harnessing Energy from Flexible Pavement

Harnessing Energy form Flexible Pavement

Minor Project

Department of Civil Engineering

Indian institute of Technology Roorkee

Project Instructor

Dr. G.D. Ransinchung R.N.

Submitted By:

Acknowledgement

First of all, we wish to express our sincere gratitude to our guide Dr. G.D. Ransinchung R.N., to provide us the opportunity to work on such an environment friendly idea through which we understood that such thing can be possible. Without his valuable guidance, encouragement and coordination we would not be able to move further in this project.  

We also place on record our sense of gratitude to one and all who, directly and indirectly have lent their helping hand to proceed ahead in this project.

Introduction

The asphalt pavements will endure millions of vehicle passes in its service life. The moving vehicles cause stress, strain, deformation and vibration in pavement. At the same time, the pavement obtains strain and kinetic energies from the work of vehicle load. However, these energies are dissipated in the pavement as wasted thermal energy, which leads to more risk of pavement damage. In recent years, researchers began to seek new technology for harvesting those mechanical energies. Piezoelectric technology is the most potential one because its ability to convert stress into electricity.

PZT based piezoelectric transducers are used widely in industry. Many of those transducers can be used to harvesting energy from the ambient, such as the multilayer, Moonie, Transducer, RAINBOW (Reduced and Internally Biased Oxide Wafer), THUNDER (Thin Layer Unimorph Ferroelectric Driver and Sensor), Bimorph, MFC (Macro-Fiber Composite) etc.

Most of current piezoelectric energy harvesting research is focusing on the ambient vibration. Bimorph, Unimorph, PVDF (Polyvinylidene fluoride) and MFC based cantilevers are major devices that are used to harvest the vibration energy to support the wireless network nodes.  The cantilevers are designed to work at resonance state driven by the ambient vibration.

MIT has developed a device embedded in the shoe to harvest the mechanical energy caused by walking or running.  THUNDER and PVDF are both used in the shoe. 80mW peak power is reported for the THUNDER.

Although many research works have done in energy harvesting area, there is little research aiming at the pavement environment.

Innowattech, an Israel based company announced that it has developed a series of piezoelectric energy harvest devices (IPEG·) for road, railroad, airport and pedestrian. A pilot project was constructed in 2009. However, no technique details are reported publicly.