An inclined pedal type piezoelectric energy harvester for pedestrian flow and vehicle safety monitoring

•Using steel balls to contact the piezoelectric patches to improve the performance.•An inclined pedal-type piezoelectric energy harvester with high power output.•The structure is designed to realize the collection of energy from pedestrians' stepping.•Combine with the pedals of a car in a low frequency excitation environment for vehicle safety monitoring.•Placed on the road in a high frequency excitation environment enables pedestrian flow monitoring. This paper proposed an inclined pedal-type piezoelectric energy harvester for pedestrian monitoring and vehicle safety monitoring (IPEH). The IPEH exterior adopts an inclined pedal design, the steel ball is placed inside its cylindrical channel to excite the piezoelectric patches to harvest and convert external mechanical energy. IPEH can be placed under the brake pedal of a car for the function of vehicle safety monitoring. IPEH can also be fixed on the road as an energy harvester and monitoring device, harvesting pedestrian trampling energy and monitoring the density of pedestrian traffic in realtime. The influence of the steel ball diameter and spring layout on the output performance of the prototype is studied in this paper. Under the best parameters of the prototype assembly, the maximum output voltage is 165.6 Vpp, and the maximum output power is 463.7 mW. In the application experiment, the practicability in energy harvesting applications of IPEH is verified through the experiment of lighting LEDs and charging capacity, and the monitoring ability of IPEH was verified by simulating the experiment of different human flow walking and vehicle braking. It provides a new idea for the subsequent application of piezoelectric equipment in traffic auxiliary facilities and intelligent sensing equipment.