125 research outputs found
Energy harvesting methods for transmission lines: a comprehensive review
Humanity faces important challenges concerning the optimal use, security, and availability of energy systems, particularly electrical power systems and transmission lines. In this context, data-driven predictive maintenance plans make it possible to increase the safety, stability, reliability, and availability of electrical power systems. In contrast, strategies such as dynamic line rating (DLR) make it possible to optimize the use of power lines. However, these approaches require developing monitoring plans based on acquiring electrical data in real-time using different types of wireless sensors placed in strategic locations. Due to the specific conditions of the transmission lines, e.g., high electric and magnetic fields, this a challenging problem, aggravated by the harsh outdoor environments where power lines are built. Such sensors must also incorporate an energy harvesting (EH) unit that supplies the necessary electronics. Therefore, the EH unit plays a key role, so when designing such electronic systems, care must be taken to select the most suitable EH technology, which is currently evolving rapidly. This work reviews and analyzes the state-of-the-art technology for EH focused on transmission lines, as it is an area with enormous potential for expansion. In addition to recent advances, it also discusses the research needs and challenges that need to be addressed. Despite the importance of this topic, there is still much to investigate, as this area is still in its infancy. Although EH systems for transmission lines are reviewed, many other applications could potentially benefit from introducing wireless sensors with EH capabilities, such as power transformers, distribution switches, or low- and medium-voltage power lines, among others.This research was funded by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación de España, grant number PID2020-114240RB-I00 and by the Generalitat de Catalunya, grant number 2017 SGR 967.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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SkinnySensor: Enabling Battery-Less Wearable Sensors Via Intrabody Power Transfer
Tremendousadvancement inultra-low powerelectronics and radiocommunica tionshas significantly contributed towards the fabrication of miniaturized biomedical sensors capable of capturing physiological data and transmitting them wirelessly. However, most of the wearable sensors require a battery for their operation. The battery serves as one of the critical bottlenecks to the development of novel wearable applications, as the limitations offered by batteries are affecting the development of new form-factors and longevity of wearable devices. In this work, we introduce a novel concept, namely Intra-Body Power Transfer (IBPT), to alleviate the limitations and problems associated with batteries, and enable wireless, batteryless wearable devices. The innovation of IBPT is to utilize the human body as the medium to transfer power to passive wearable devices, as opposed to employingon-boardbatteries for each individual device. The proposed platform eliminates the on-board rigid battery for ultra-low power and ultra-miniaturized sensors such that their form-factor can be flexible, ergonomically designed to be placed on small body parts. The platform also eliminates the need for battery maintenance (e.g., recharging or replacement) for multiple wearable devices other than the central power source. The performance of the developed system is tested and evaluated in comparison to traditional Radio Frequency based solutions that can be harmful to human interaction. The system developed is capable of harvesting on average 217µW at 0.43V and provides an average sleep/high impedance mode voltage of 4.5V
Energy Harvesting Powered Wireless Sensor Nodes With Energy Efficient Network Joining Strategies
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via the DOI in this recordThis paper presents strategies for batteryless energy
harvesting powered wireless sensor nodes based on IEEE
802.15.4e standard to join the network successfully with minimal
attempts, which minimizes energy wastage. This includes using a
well-sized capacitor and different duty cycles for the network
joining. Experimental results showed a wireless sensor node that
uses a 100 mF energy storage capacitor can usually join the
network in one attempt but multiple attempts may be needed if it
uses smaller capacitances especially when the harvested power is
low. With a duty-cycled network joining, the time required to form
a network is shorter, which reduces the overall energy usage of the
nodes in joining the network. An energy harvesting powered
wireless sensor network (WSN) was successfully formed in one
attempt by using the proposed methods.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC
Sophisticated Batteryless Sensing
Wireless embedded sensing systems have revolutionized scientific, industrial, and consumer applications. Sensors have become a fixture in our daily lives, as well as the scientific and industrial communities by allowing continuous monitoring of people, wildlife, plants, buildings, roads and highways, pipelines, and countless other objects. Recently a new vision for sensing has emerged---known as the Internet-of-Things (IoT)---where trillions of devices invisibly sense, coordinate, and communicate to support our life and well being. However, the sheer scale of the IoT has presented serious problems for current sensing technologies---mainly, the unsustainable maintenance, ecological, and economic costs of recycling or disposing of trillions of batteries. This energy storage bottleneck has prevented massive deployments of tiny sensing devices at the edge of the IoT. This dissertation explores an alternative---leave the batteries behind, and harvest the energy required for sensing tasks from the environment the device is embedded in. These sensors can be made cheaper, smaller, and will last decades longer than their battery powered counterparts, making them a perfect fit for the requirements of the IoT. These sensors can be deployed where battery powered sensors cannot---embedded in concrete, shot into space, or even implanted in animals and people. However, these batteryless sensors may lose power at any point, with no warning, for unpredictable lengths of time. Programming, profiling, debugging, and building applications with these devices pose significant challenges. First, batteryless devices operate in unpredictable environments, where voltages vary and power failures can occur at any time---often devices are in failure for hours. Second, a device\u27s behavior effects the amount of energy they can harvest---meaning small changes in tasks can drastically change harvester efficiency. Third, the programming interfaces of batteryless devices are ill-defined and non- intuitive; most developers have trouble anticipating the problems inherent with an intermittent power supply. Finally, the lack of community, and a standard usable hardware platform have reduced the resources and prototyping ability of the developer. In this dissertation we present solutions to these challenges in the form of a tool for repeatable and realistic experimentation called Ekho, a reconfigurable hardware platform named Flicker, and a language and runtime for timely execution of intermittent programs called Mayfly
Waldo: Batteryless Occupancy Monitoring with Reflected Ambient Light
Reliable and accurate room-level occupancy-tracking systems can enable many new advances in sensors and applications of modern smart buildings. This allows buildings to be more capable of adapting to the needs of their occupants in their day-to-day activities and better optimize certain resources, such as power and air conditioning, to do so. Unfortunately, existing occupancy-tracking systems are plagued by large size, high energy consumption, and, unsurprisingly, short battery lifetimes.
In this paper, we present Waldo, a batteryless, room-level occupancy monitoring sensor that harvests energy from indoor ambient light reflections, and uses changes in these reflections to detect when people enter and exit a room. Waldo is mountable at the top of a doorframe, allowing for detection of a person and the direction they are traveling at the entry and exit point of a room. We evaluated the Waldo sensor in an office-style setting under mixed lighting conditions (natural and artificial) on both sides of the doorway with subjects exhibiting varying physical characteristics such as height, hair color, gait, and clothing. 651 number of controlled experiments were ran on 6 doorways with 12 individuals and achieved a total detection accuracy of 97.38%. Further, it judged the direction of movement correctly with an accuracy of 95.42%. This paper also evaluates and discusses various practical factors that can impact the performance of the current system in actual deployments.
This work demonstrates that ambient light reflections provide both a promising low-cost, long-term sustainable option for monitoring how people use buildings and an exciting new research direction for batteryless computing
Dense and long-term monitoring of Earth surface processes with passive RFID -- a review
Billions of Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) passive tags are produced
yearly to identify goods remotely. New research and business applications are
continuously arising, including recently localization and sensing to monitor
earth surface processes. Indeed, passive tags can cost 10 to 100 times less
than wireless sensors networks and require little maintenance, facilitating
years-long monitoring with ten's to thousands of tags. This study reviews the
existing and potential applications of RFID in geosciences. The most mature
application today is the study of coarse sediment transport in rivers or
coastal environments, using tags placed into pebbles. More recently, tag
localization was used to monitor landslide displacement, with a centimetric
accuracy. Sensing tags were used to detect a displacement threshold on unstable
rocks, to monitor the soil moisture or temperature, and to monitor the snowpack
temperature and snow water equivalent. RFID sensors, available today, could
monitor other parameters, such as the vibration of structures, the tilt of
unstable boulders, the strain of a material, or the salinity of water. Key
challenges for using RFID monitoring more broadly in geosciences include the
use of ground and aerial vehicles to collect data or localize tags, the
increase in reading range and duration, the ability to use tags placed under
ground, snow, water or vegetation, and the optimization of economical and
environmental cost. As a pattern, passive RFID could fill a gap between
wireless sensor networks and manual measurements, to collect data efficiently
over large areas, during several years, at high spatial density and moderate
cost.Comment: Invited paper for Earth Science Reviews. 50 pages without references.
31 figures. 8 table
Simulation and performance analysis of self-powered piezoelectric energy harvesting system for low power applications
Energy harvesting is a process of extracting energy from surrounding environments. The extracted energy is stored in the supply power for various applications like wearable, wireless sensor, and internet of thing (IoT) applications. The electricity generation using conventional approaches is very costly and causes more pollution in the environmental surroundings. In this manuscript, an energy-efficient, self-powered battery-less piezoelectric-based energy harvester (PE-EH) system is modeled using maximum power point tracking (MPPT) module. The MPPT is used to track the optimal voltage generated by the piezoelectric (PE) sensor and stored across the capacitor. The proposed PE system is self-operated without additional microarchitecture to harvest the Power. The experimental simulation results for the overall PE-EH systems are analyzed for different frequency ranges with variable input source vibrations. The optimal voltage storage across the storing capacitor varies from 1.12 to 1.6 V. The PE-EH system can harvest power up to 86 µW without using any voltage source and is suitable for low-power applications. The proposed PE-EH module is compared with the existing similar EH system with better improvement in harvested power
Energy harvesting and wireless transfer in sensor network applications: Concepts and experiences
Advances in micro-electronics and miniaturized mechanical systems are redefining the scope and extent of the energy constraints found in battery-operated wireless sensor networks (WSNs). On one hand, ambient energy harvesting may prolong the systems lifetime or possibly enable perpetual operation. On the other hand, wireless energy transfer allows systems to decouple the energy sources from the sensing locations, enabling deployments previously unfeasible. As a result of applying these technologies to WSNs, the assumption of a finite energy budget is replaced with that of potentially infinite, yet intermittent, energy supply, profoundly impacting the design, implementation, and operation of WSNs. This article discusses these aspects by surveying paradigmatic examples of existing solutions in both fields and by reporting on real-world experiences found in the literature. The discussion is instrumental in providing a foundation for selecting the most appropriate energy harvesting or wireless transfer technology based on the application at hand. We conclude by outlining research directions originating from the fundamental change of perspective that energy harvesting and wireless transfer bring about
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