Harvesting Electric Energy During Walking With a Backpack: Physiological, Ergonomic, Biomechanical, and Electromechanical Materials, Devices, and System Considerations
Abstract
The objective of this program is to investigate approaches which make use of several classes of electroactive materials developed recently for harvesting electric energy during walking. These newly developed electroactive materials including the electrostrictive PVDF based polymers and piezoelectric relaxor single crystals have shown order of magnitude improvement in terms of the elastic energy density in comparison with the traditional piezoelectric materials and much improved the electromechanical coupling factors. Furthermore, in this program, we show that the electromechanical conversion efficiency of a properly designed energy harvesting system can be much higher than these of the electroactive material itself. Using this principle, we demonstrated that an electric energy output of 39 mJ/cc with a 10% efficiency can be obtained from the electrostrictive PVDF polymers. Using 1-3 composites with ferroelectric relaxor single crystals, harvested electric power density of 96 mW/cc has been obtained (at 4 Hz).
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2005
- Accession Number
- ADA428873
Entities
People
- Heath Hogmann
- Qiming Zhang
Organizations
- Pennsylvania State University