Design of a Sustainable System for Harvesting Energy from Humans, Based on the Piezoelectric Effect in Places of High Mobilization of People

Abstract

The present project seeks to design a novel sustainable energy generation system at a University taking advantage of non-conventional renewable energy that can be obtained from humans using piezoelectric tiles. This idea came up from the opportunity to use human movement as a source of energy due to the great flow of people on campus, that’s why the aim of this project was to analyze their characteristics to design the distribution of the tiles on the floor in such a way that the greatest amount of energy can be obtained. The method was based in the anthropometrical and biomechanical profiling of the population in order to quantify the potential energy that could be obtained through the movement of people when they activate the piezoelectric product, located and distributed in the place that will be identified as the area with the greatest possibility of energy generation. The tiles proposed for the final design are composed of 80% recyclable materials, which shows that it is an environmental-friendly product. As a result, it was obtained that when a woman with a weight of 48,88 kg (5 percentile) activates a tile produce a power of 4,83 W and a man with a weight of 93,94 kg (95 percentile) produce 9,67 W. The selection procedure of the piezoelectric system configuration was designed using the methodology of the hierarchical process analysis – HPA. The project also contributes to mitigate the environmental impact and the costs of current energy sources from the university. If the piezoelectric tiles were installed as indicated by the final configuration in the main traffic path obtained in the analysis of this project, 84.478 kg of CO₂ could be saved in the case of producing the minimum energy which is 424.517 kWh and 169.133 kg of CO₂ saved in the case of producing the maximum energy corresponding to 849.913 kWh.