Response Surface Methodology Analysis of Energy Harvesting System over Pathway Tiles

This paper presents an experimental analysis of the optimization of PZT-based tiles for energy harvesting. The hardware (actual experiment), PZT-based tiles, were developed using 6 × 6 piezoelectric (PZT—lead zirconate titanate) sensors of 40 mm in diameter on a hard cardboard sheet (300 × 300 mm(2)). Our experimental analysis of the designed tiles obtained an optimized power of 3.626 mW (85 kg or 0.83 kN using 36 sensors) for one footstep and 0.9 mW for 30 footsteps at high tapping frequency. Theoretical analysis was conducted with software (Design-Expert) using the response surface methodology (RSM) for optimized PZT tiles, obtaining a power of 6784.155 mW at 150 kg or 1.47 kN weight using 34 sensors. This software helped to formulate the mathematical equation for the most suitable PZT tile model for power optimization. It used the quadratic model to provide adjusted and predicted R2 values of 0.9916 and 0.9650, respectively. The values were less than 0.2 apart, which indicates a high correlation between the actual and predicted values. The outcome of the various experiments can help with the selection of input factors for optimized power during pavement design.