Laboratory Testing of Piezoelectric Bridge Transducers for Asphalt Pavement Energy Harvesting

This paper presents the test results of the energy converting efficiency of piezoelectric Bridge transducer for harvesting stress driven energy in asphalt pavement. The arc and the trapezoidal Bridge transducer were made for performance comparison. The Bridge transducers were tested by Universal Testing Machine (UTM) under different frequencies and distributed load. The output voltage was recorded by digital storage oscillograph. 4 groups of data were obtained. The maximum output voltage of 232V was recorded from the arc Bridge transducer in the initial laboratory test, which was conducted under 0.4 MPa with 5 Hz half-sine loads. However, only 106V maximum output voltage was measured from the trapezoidal Bridge transducer under the same load and 154V was measured under 0.7 MPa with 5Hz half-sine loads. The results show the possibility of harvesting energy from pavement. Higher energy converting efficiency of arc Bridge transducer was measured compared to the trapezoidal Bridge transducer.