Triboelectric-Powered System for Pedestrian and Vehicle Detection with Wireless Data Transmission

This paper report an autonomous and wireless system for detecting the passage of a human (pedestrian) or a vehicle based on a basic and low-cost triboelectric sensor/generator made of a PTFE sheet and aluminum plates’ transducer. A high-voltage conditioning circuit using a plasma switch and a 2-stage power management system is supplying a BLE module comprising 5 sensors. These sensors are being supplied solely from the harvested energy generated by the triboelectric transducer (TENG) after an initial pre-charge. In preliminary laboratory tests, up to 200 µJ where generated by a single human step, and three steps are sufficient to send the sensor data. Furthermore, we have demonstrated the data transmission/detection of each human step without any additional electronics, but only with the DC rectifier and the plasma switch using the principle of the Hertz experiment.