Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting via Shoe Sole

This paper present the experimental design of an energy harvesting system using active materials for power generation from the shoe sole. The active material as PZT has been employed and modified to be appropriately embedded in the shoe sole. When the mechanical pressure is applied to the embedded shoe sole while walking would extract mechanical vibration energy and convert extracted energy to electrical energy directly from the piezoelectric structure inserted in shoe sole via a rectifier to a power processing system. The power processing system regulates the harvested electrical energy and accumulates the generated electrical energy to sufficient voltage level for powering portable electronic devices for later use. In this paper we show the simulation and experimental results of energy harvesting circuit and efficiency of the extracted ambient vibration energy by PZT in terms of electrical voltages during single step and continuous walking for a period of time.