Energy harvesting with piezoelectric applied on shoes

In the last few years the continuous demand of energy saving has brought continuous research on low-power devices, energy storage and new sources of energy. Energy harvesting is an interesting solution that captures the energy from the environment that would otherwise be wasted. This work presents an electric-mechanical model of a piezoelectric transducer in a cantilever configuration. The model has been characterized measuring the acceleration and the open circuit voltage of a piezoelectric cantilever subjected to a sinusoidal force with different values frequency and subject to an impulsive force. The model has been used to identify the optimal position in which the piezoelectric cantilever has to be placed on a shoe in order to obtain the maximum energy while walking or running. As a second step we designed the DC-DC converter with an hysteresis comparator. The circuit is able to give energy to switch on a microprocessor for the amount of time long enough to capture and store the information required. The complete system has been implemented, installed on a shoe and used in a 10 Km running competition.