GREECOPE: Green Computing with Piezoelectric Effect

The growing interest in the search and use of alternative resources for renewable energy can lead the future towards substantially decreasing carbon footprint and reduce the effects of global warming. The proposed research explores the possibility of harnessing piezoelectric energy from the environment of moving vehicles on road. Although the technology is still immature, it has the advantage of having zero carbon footprints thus making it ideal to investigate the potential for green energy generation. The main objective is to develop regression models that can estimate energy generated from vehicular traffic. Energy is generated when force is applied to piezoelectric transducers which depend on significant factors such as the number of piezoelectric transducers and their arrangement, load applied and frequency. We design Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Generalised Linear Model (GLM) for predicting energy. The best features for training the model were selected by incorporating feature selection techniques such as Pearson’s correlation coefficient and Mutual Information Statistics. The experimental setup makes use of simulated data which takes into account vehicle count of different vehicles with and without load. The accuracy achieved from SVM and GLM are 99.6% and 99.7% respectively. The energy savings achieved by making use of generated piezoelectric energy is discussed with a sample scenario of Motorway50 of Dublin, the Irish Capital city. Through this work, we propose to investigate deeper into the feasibility towards cost-effectiveness by utilizing energy which is wasted by human and vehicular locomotion.