A Senior Design Project in Prototyping Roadway Energy Harvesting with Piezoelectric Crystal

The paper presents a senior design project that engages in educational activities to enhance learning in green energy manufacturing, including construction of piezoelectric energy collector system and laboratory experiments in the efficient energy harvesting of the system. The goal of the senior design project was to engage students in real-world learning experiences for the design of energy harvesting as an initial stepping stone for the future construction of manufacturing plants in industry. The project design consists of stacks of piezoelectric sensors embedded within a wooden composite board to utilize roadway traffic. The design assures the piezoelectric material is subjected to strains and produces a charge used to supply voltage through the means of a harvesting circuit which charges capacitors and stores it in an onboard capacitor bank. A series of steps were taken to determine voltage, current, material properties and circuit configuration of the system. In order to maximize the potential of the piezoelectric energy harvesting system, a large amount of mechanical energy was present in order to harvest as much energy as possible. The higher the traffic volume, the more energy that can generated. The student learning outcome of this project was the successful design of the energy harvesting for collecting vibration energy. It provides an introduction to the different areas within engineering by including the mechanical design of a system to vibrate a piezoelectric device and the electrical conditioning and analysis of the piezoelectric energy input. For the sake of achieving the student learning outcomes, experiments were conducted, including sensor monitoring and process control. A concluding section discusses the student learning experiences during this project.