Crowd Management for Power Generation: A Critical Analysis on the Existing Materials and Methods. (Structural Modal Analysis)

Energy harvesting by means of different materials and mechanisms is considered an important topic of interest in past decades. Materials such as piezoelectric, electromagnetic and electrostatic in nature are generally used to harvest energy in many of the sensing applications. Mechanisms based on simple deformation, vibration and magnetism are used to harvest energies in power generation applications. The published research shows that the harvested energy from these materials and mechanisms are still far away from practical feasibility and optimisation. However, not a single review article is available which can provide a critical analysis on the existing materials and methods with regards to the mentioned feasibility and optimisation. In this paper, a review attempt has been made to describe the mentioned analysis. All the past research is described in two categories: Energy Harvesting through Materials and Energy Harvesting through Mechanisms. The materials used for energy harvesting contain characteristic to release electric charge under the influence of an external excitation. Several materials such as Multiwalled Carbon Nano Tubes (MWCNT), Polyvinylidene Fluoride (PVDF), Polydimethyl siloxane (PDMS) and ZirconateTitanate (PZT) with slight change in their internal properties and efficiencies are used to harvest charge. In contrast to the materials, several mechanisms are also in use to produce useful energy from available external forces. Their mechanics is principally based on phenomena like structural vibrations, electromagnetic induction, and magnetism. This review concludes that a methodology of energy harvesting which can utilise any random load and converts into maximum useful energy is still not present.