HARDWARE SOFTWARE CO IMPLEMENTATION OF PEDESTAL ENERGY HARVESTING USING SUPERCAPACITOR AND COMPARISON WITH ALTERNATIVE ENERGY STORING DEVICES

Pedestrian energy harvesting is an environmentally friendly and innovative form of green energy. This research presents a systematic design, simulation, experimental evaluation and hardware implementation of a pedestrian energy harvesting system, optimized for sustainable power generation using footstep-induced mechanical input. The system incorporates a piezoelectric harvester, buck converter and three energy storage configurations such as battery, supercapacitor and a hybrid battery supercapacitor module. The component-level parameters, including input/output voltages of the components were designed initially. The optimal voltages and current values for the components were measured for energy flow and maximum power transfer to determine the better storage efficiency were conducted using MATLAB/Simulink and Simscape. Two sets of simulation-based experiments were conducted to determine the buck converter input resistances and storage device input resistance which gave the highest efficiency. The buck converter resistance was fixed at 0.01 KΩ and it was found that the battery achieved its highest efficiency of 40.1% at an input resistance of 60 KΩ. For the supercapacitor and the hybrid battery-supercapacitor system, the optimal input resistance was 600 Ω, resulting in efficiencies of 41.2% and 43.06%, respectively. Taking into consideration the realistic values of the output voltages of the pedestrian energy harvesting system, the design was done to give output voltage of 3.9V, 3V and 6V for battery, supercapacitor and hybrid model respectively. The same was implemented in hardware. This work reinforces the significance of impedance optimization and hybrid energy storage in achieving reliable, high-efficiency micro-energy systems and sets a foundation for future advancements in smart wearables and energy-autonomous infrastructure.