Pressure Simulation for Footstep Energy Harvesting Paver

Abstract

Amongst all the energy sources from human motion, footstep has the potential of producing electrical energy as an alternative source to non-conventional renewable energy. Researchers have shown that human footstep kinetic energy can be converted to electrical energy by devised mechanism for low power application such as powering lights, radio and charging phones. Eventually, a novel fluid based energy harvesting paver was developed and tested to contribute towards sustainable development. The paver uses mini hydro generators to produce energy as fluid is forced through these mini hydro generators upon human stepping. This paper presents the pressure simulation of fluid bag system when subjected to an applied human force and the quarter ellipsoid shaped proved to be the best performer which can produce upto 1.4J per step. The pressure simulation provides a relation between pressure and output power. Keywords-footstep, fluid bag, fluid based energy harvester, non-conventional renewable energy and pressure

Design simulation of a novel fluid based footstep energy harvesting system

“…• Nodes: ranges from 4162 to 3887 • Elements: ranges from 14,986 to1383 Initially, simulation was carried out to find out whether the nature of the shape of the paver influences fluid circulation between containers or not. This was done by assuming an inlet velocity of 0.2 m/s for all the shapes and monitoring the output velocity to see which shape gave the maximum output [64]. The flat tile of 350 mm × 350 mm comes fully in contact with the red surfaces for each of the possible solution.…”

Energy Harvesting from Close Type Footwear: A Smart Design Approach

“…The conventional energy sources are declining gradually towards positive entropy due to the rapid growth of population and commercial development [1,2]. Therefore, non-conventional alternative energy sources such as human movement-based activities is crucial that consume efficient renewable energy by improving energy conversion structure to cope up the energy demand [3].…”