A shoe-equipped piezoelectric transducer system based on PVDF film

Abstract

Many piezoelectric transducers mounted in shoes have been conducted to harvest energy from walking. However, the energy harvested is influenced by some factors, such as the structure of piezoelectric transducer, piezoelectric material and so forth. Taking into account these factors, a wide-band energy harvester-shoe equipped piezoelectric transducer with cantilever beam structure based on polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) piezoelectric film is designed and examined in this paper. The piezoelectric transducer makes little difference in the sensation with the device mounted in the shoes when walking. The harvester can provide a maximum output power of 0.48 mW at the load resistance of 300 kΩ. This study demonstrates that it is feasible to scavenge energy from human motion by piezoelectric harvester to power wearable sensors, such as pedometer, respiration and pulse monitoring system and so on.