An innovative device for Energy Harvesting in smart cities

Recently the technology development and increasing amounts of investment in renewables has determined a growing interest towards design and optimization of green energy systems. In this context, advanced Computational Intelligence (CI) techniques can be applied by engineers to several technical problems in order to find out the best structure and to improve efficiency in energy recovery. This research promise to give new impulse to using innovative unconventional renewable sources and to develop the so called Energy Harvesting Devices (EHDs). In this paper the optimization of an innovative device for traffic energy harvesting applications is presented. The optimization process is developed by means of evolutionary algorithms to reach the best efficiency and reduce the overall impact on the environment. Finally, an implemented experiment of the designed EHD prototype is presented.