Development of a novel compression-based piezoelectric traffic model for improving the roadways energy harvesting system by applying the celular Atomata traffic model

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to conduct simulations to increase and analyse the harvested energy in roadway applications. An electromechanical-traffic model of compression-based piezoelectric energy harvesting that exploits the vibrations derived from traffic movement is simulated. The model also being studied on the critical system parameters (e.g. behaviour of traffic flow, number of vehicles, the optimum electrical load, the maximum voltage and the area) accurately based on the simulation of data. Therefore, these factors are considered when designing the traffic model to produce the optimal power. The most significant outcome of this research is the harvesting of electrical energy from piezoelectric arrays by using roadway applications to generate various scales of useable power. The focus from vehicles are on testing and simulating one set array of Piezoelectric Cymbal Transducer (PCTs) and two set arrays of PCTs. By proposing the model, simulating it under different parameters include mean arrival rate (λ), resistance, single lane, two lanes, single PCT and arrays of PCTs. Besides, the Cellular Automata (CA) traffic model is used to represent the traffic flow model. On average, the obtained results show that the highest total power is generated at the highest arrival rate and low resistance. The generated power for a single lane with 2 arrays of PCTs is as much as 170 W and 345 W for two lanes with two arrays of PCTs. The results also show that at low resistance the output power increases whenever the number of PCTs and lanes increase. © 2019, International Journal of Renewable Energy Research.