GENERATING ELECTRICITY FROM PAVEMENT

Prathima G, Sachin Jaiswal, Unica Khadka, Vishal Thakker

Abstract: In today’s world, due to vast expansion of infrastructure and the increase in population has caused our natural resources to deplete considerably, causing an energy crisis. Thus it is important to use renewable sources of energy, for example, solar radiation from the sun. Various methods of energy harvesting systems are being developed and studied. Energy harvesting from pavement is one of its kind which involves encapsulating the heat from the pavement surface and converting it to electrical energy. The pavement surface absorbs the solar radiation and gets heated, thus increasing the internal temperature of the pavement. The heat is tapped and converted into electrical energy using Thermo Electric Generators (TEGs). TEG is a thermoelectric component which works on the principle of Seebeck Effect that generates EMF when there is a temperature difference between its two faces. This potential difference tends to allow the electrons to flow from higher to lower potential thus generating electricity. A similar project work had been carried out earlier at International Conference On Recent Advances in Engineering Sciences (ICRAES-2014) with ISSN 2349-9575 Volume 2 Issue 1 January-June 2014 (Journal Of Civil Engineering Technology and Research organized by MS Ramaiah Institute Of Technology). Earlier project was conducted by preparing samples in the laboratory with a use of single TEG to harvest electricity and a voltage of 1.5V was generated which was sufficient to light a low voltage LED. The present work was extended for a series of connection of TEGs (3 in no.) in order to obtain more voltage output and the study has produced the outcome of an average voltage of 3.5V throughout the day that may be stored in the batteries and later use it for various applications.

Keywords: Renewable, Proportioning, Aggregates, Pavement, Thermoelectric Generators, Voltage, Temperature Difference.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2016.0526008