IIT Mandi Researchers Develop Road That Can Generate Electricity By Walking

With climate change and the world getting hotter and hotter, we are trying to come up with cleaner ways to produce energy by switching from using fossil fuels-based energy sources to renewable energy sources.

Now, IIT Mandi researchers have come up with a new method to generate electricity just by walking on a street.

The technology makes use of piezoelectric materials. For your information, piezoelectric materials are the ones that can interconvert electrical energy and mechanical energy.

Such materials are embedded into the streets and when people and vehicles move, the energy will be generated. In theory, this might sound cool. But in reality, it isn’t as impactful. The energy that the materials produced is extremely low, limiting their applications.

But now, researchers from IIT Mandi have renovated the application using a new technology known as graded polling. One of the lead researchers, Dr. Rahul Vaish said that the new tech could enhance the piezoelectric materials’ power output by over 100 times.

Researchers have tried out several techniques to use different mechanical stresses like bending, tensile and compressive stresses at the piezoelectric cantilever beams’ top and bottom, and shear stresses in the middle section to improve the overall electrical output.

The results of this research act as an incentive for other researchers to come up with actual piezoelectric designs making use of the graded poling technique. The researchers recommend connecting the sample’s right face to the ground while applying the top faces with an electric potential.

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