The Quest for Renewable Energy—Effects of Different Asphalt Mixes and Laboratory Loading on Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters

In furtherance of the quest for green renewable and sustainable energy, an effort was made in this laboratory study to generate and harvest electric power from hot-mix asphalt (HMA); a viscoelastic material that is widely used for road construction. The underlying hypothesis is that the mechanical vibrations and strain energy induced by vehicle loading on the road (pavement) can be harnessed and converted into usable electric power by embedding piezoelectric sensors within the HMA layers of the pavement structure. To investigate the effects of HMA mix type on the generated energy, four commonly used Texas mix types, namely Type B (coarse-graded), Type C (dense-graded), Type D (dense-to-fine graded), and Type F (fine-graded), with up to seven different HMA mix-design volumetric characteristics were comparatively evaluated in the laboratory. In the study, the effects of loading, namely load magnitude and loading frequency, were investigated by simulating the traffic loading in the laboratory through comparative testing with the Hamburg wheel-tracking tester (HWTT) and the universal testing machine (UTM), respectively, at different temperature conditions. A prototype highway sensing and energy conversion (HiSEC) module with piezoelectric sensors was utilized for converting the applied stress on the HMA into harvestable electric energy during HWTT and UTM laboratory testing, respectively. The generated electric current, voltage, and power were measured and quantified using a multipurpose power meter. Overall, the study demonstrated that there is promising potential to harvest energy from HMA when subjected to transient loading under different temperature conditions. However, further refinement of the HiSEC module and piezoelectric sensors is still warranted to optimize the power generation and harvesting capacity, both in terms of efficiency and power output.