This activity is in response to NSF Dear Colleague Letter Supporting Transition of Research into Cities through the US ASEAN ((Association of Southeast Asian Nations Cities) Smart Cities Partnership in collaboration with NSF and the US State Department. Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) will be partnering with University Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN) at Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia, to develop renewable energy sources for bike lanes in KL. Kuala Lumpur is the largest city in Malaysia, and it is home to approximately 1.808 million people. The city has an 11 km long dedicated bicycle lane to reduce traffic congestion. The partnership between PVAMU and UNITEN will accelerate innovation in bike lane energy technologies. The vision of the project is to develop composite power generating cells that will generate power when bikes are ridden on the power generating cells. The energy will be harvested from composite power generating cells and will be laid on the bike lanes. The harvested energy will be used for emergency lamps along the bikeways to give more safety to the bikers or provide electric power for electronic signs installed alongside the bikeways. In addition, the harvested energy will be used for charging gadgets and provide purified water for bikers or pedestrians. The multi-sourced energy system will have applications in supplying power for (i) rainwater purification through reverse osmosis systems, (ii) emergency lights, and (iii) charging stations in the bike lanes in the city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The system will be initially tested at PVAMU and will then be integrated with UNITEN and piloted in Kuala Lumpur. The project will have a huge impact on the green lifestyle of the people at Kuala Lumpur. Moreover, the research matured in this project may be suitable for use in other ASEAN cities as well as many cities and towns in the United States to provide renewable energy sources for their bike lanes.
The main goals of the project are: (i) develop a composite power generating cells that generate power under pressure, (ii) design charge collection electronic circuits to store the generated power, (iii) fabricate an integrated pad system with power generating cells, charge collection circuits, battery storage, and paint, (iv) install and test the integrated pad system at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The activity will leverage research at Prairie View A&M and UNITEN. To enable the use in bike lanes, thin-film PZT cells with optimized thickness will be developed. The energy and thickness of the film will be determined for each type of nanomaterial of the PZT cell. Experiments will be conducted to determine cells? edge-to-edge distances, total energy output, the thickness of the PZT, and time responses of energy accumulation. A microcontroller-based energy monitoring system will manage the energy production and consumption for mobile charging applications. The cells will be configured with a matrix of paint strips on bike lanes. In addition to the composite power generating cells, solar panels will be combined in various places throughout the bike lanes to the energy-collection-rail, thus creating the sustainable multi-sourced energy system for the bike lanes. Various experiments will be performed to optimize the energy process from the bike lane. The design will be tested at PVAMU and then integrated into a bike lane infrastructure in Kuala Lumpur. The PVAMU and UNITEN team will be collaborating with city planning personnel to validate the concept and support evaluation as part of KL smart city activities.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
