Piezoelectric Floor Mat

• Christopher Casey
• Zewedi Gezahne
• Afzaal Zeb
• Zubairuddin Mohammed
• Jason Manix

The UIC Office of Sustainability in collaboration with the UIC Energy Initiative has a goal of making UIC a Carbon Neutral Campus (The amount of carbon the University emits through its operations, purchased electricity, and travel is reduced or offset entirely). UIC is currently utilizing both geothermal and solar power to introduce clean energy to UIC’s campus. In order to assist in this goal, we at RenewABLES want to harness the mechanical energy of student migrating around campus and convert it into electrical energy. The piezoelectric effect does just this. When a piezoelectric element is mechanically stress, there is a dipole moment created on the element to which a voltage difference can be seen and harnessed. When students migrate across UIC’s campus, they will be walking across our piezoelectric floor mat. As traffic flows across this mat, the piezoelectric elements inside the mats will utilize students’ mechanical energy (footsteps) and convert it to a clean electrical output that can be stored or used as accessory energy in the building. In order to be competitive with solar energy, we need to harness roughly 750 Watts of power per week. Given our limited budget, through this device, we are able to show only a proof of concept that can be expanded on and implemented with an increased budget. Due to the budget constraints and order lead time of more efficient piezoelectric disks, we cannot physically display our final goal, but through a visual simulation utilizing the specs of parts available with an unlimited budget, we will show how this is possible on UIC’s campus. In order to demonstrate the concept, we have scaled down the product to serve as a representation for what can be expanded on in the future.