Energy harvesting: an interesting topic for education programs in engineering specialities

Nowadays some possible alternative methods to replace the batteries as power source, or to achieve better maintenance of existing (or smaller) batteries, are the so called Energy Harvesting (EH) methods, i.e. to obtain energy from the environment or recover and store energy generated by the human body in its usual activities. However, this requires specific technology and materials and usually a multidisciplinary team. For this reason, inclusion a topic on energy harvesting in educational programs of several engineering specialties at technical universities is of great importance.
In this paper we present some results from interdisciplinary collaboration at Faculty of Science and Technology at Nova University of Lisbon on the energy harvesting. Experiments were performed in order to calculate the power that could be generated from the chest movements during breathing and from the feet during walking, etc. For the experiments, mostly piezoelectric effect was explored.