Indonesian Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Vol. 11, No. 2, August 2018, pp. 755~760 ISSN: 2502-4752, DOI: 10.11591/ijeecs.v11.i2.pp755-760  755 Journal homepage: http://iaescore.com/journals/index.php/ijeecs The Study of Stresses on Soil from Roadways Using Plaxis to Generate Potential Energy with Piezoelectric A. J. M. S. Lim 1 , S. Y. Sim 2 , N. Anting 3 , J. Prasetijo 4 , T. I. T Noor Hasanah 5 , H. H. Goh 6 , Y. M. Y. Buswig 7 , C. C. Kang 8 1,3,8 Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, 86400 Parit Raja, Batu Pahat, Johor, Malaysia 2,4,5 Faculty of Engineering Technology, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, 86400 Parit Raja, Batu Pahat, Johor, Malaysia 6 Faculty of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, 86400 Parit Raja, Batu Pahat, Johor, Malaysia 7 Deparment of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, 94300, Kota Samarahan, Malaysia Article Info ABSTRACT Article history: Received Feb 11, 2018 Revised Apr 20, 2018 Accepted Apr 27, 2018 Environmental resources exploitation is one of the critical problems in environmental engineering. The overuse of environmental resources can lead to a huge impact for the environment and human itself. The problems of extracting and processing of raw materials from earth such as mining, steam power and machinery has increased year by year and this is the main reason that the resources has become very limited for the future generations to use them. This study is focused in designing a roadway through software analysis which will use the concept of piezoelectricity that will convert the stress energy from the roadways into electrical energy. A software which is called PLAXIS 2D will be used to simulate the stresses from the roadway which are caused by moving vehicle loading. The parameters of laterite and clay soil such as Specific Gravity, Liquid Limit, Friction Angle and Cohesion are obtained from the past research is needed for the input of the software. The loading application in the PLAXIS 2D uses the Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion in which fully drained and axisymmetric conditions were assumed. A non-uniform grid with 1726 elements was performed for the calculations on a 2-dimensional cross-sections of 11m x 3m roadway. The stresses resulted from the software are used to determine the value of stresses required for the piezoelectric to convert the stress energy into electrical energy. Keywords: Effective stress Piezoelectric Plaxis Copyright © 2018 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved. Corresponding Author: A. J. M. S. Lim, Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, 86400 Parit Raja, Batu Pahat, Johor, Malaysia. Email: alvin@uthm.edu.my 1. INTRODUCTION Roadways are main infrastructure for connecting people and providing access and mobility [1]. One of the functions of roadways is load distribution. It can be characterized by the tire loads, tire configurations, repetition of loads, distributions of traffic across the pavement, and vehicle speed. Also, these different types of roads have different widths, in which will have different amount of vehicles passing on them where the many vehicles such as in Kuala lumpur faces congestion on every major avenue, junction or intersection it mostly owes to the offices and the economic and commercial centers during the peak hours [2]. The traffic- induced strains and stresses generated by the vehicles can be potentially used for energy harvesting purposes.