Design enhancements of the smart sediment particle for riverbed transport monitoring

This paper discusses new enhancements that are being made to the existing ‘Smart Sediment Particle’. The smart sediment particle has been designed and implemented to track its own 3-dimensional trajectory when placed in a riverbed. This device serves as a tool to detect sedimentation in rivers. The device has been developed over the years, with its size diminishing significantly down to a sphere of 2cm radius. The readings obtained from the pebble are accurate and match well with other independent motion sensor readings. Currently a novel IPT (Inductive Power Transfer) based power supply is being integrated to this device, to charge it wirelessly, when it has been extracted from the water. A new low power, miniaturized microcontroller has been introduced to minimize the power consumption and the PCB real estate of the device. The paper discusses these new enhancements in detail and also other potential enhancements such as error compensation and wireless data transfer

Low-cost autonomous 3-D monitoring systems for hydraulic engineering environments and applications with limited accuracy requirements

The details of developing autonomous 3-D motion monitoring systems based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) motion sensors for hydraulic environments are discussed. Possible areas of application, are river bed sediment transport monitoring and monitoring the agitation and other physical parameters inside milk vats with a mechanized agitator. Simplified calculations of inertial navigation systems (INSs) such as Euler angle method, MATLAB programs for further processing, power management systems for autonomous operation including the possibility of inductive power transfer (IPT) and use of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology are discussed. Experimental results for proof of concept systems are highlighted

A Power Processing Circuit for Indoor Wi-Fi Energy Harvesting for Ultra-Low Power Wireless Sensors

This article proposes a complete power processing circuit for an indoor 2.45 GHz Wi-Fi energy harvesting system. The proposed power processing circuit works by using power harvested from indoor Wi-Fi transmitters. The overall system of this work is simplified as an equivalent circuit and analyzed mathematically. A two-port network is analyzed in formulating the relevant equations of the equivalent circuit. The importance of matching the impedance of a harvesting antenna to the rectifier circuit is highlighted by using simulation analysis, and it is shown that the impedance matching for both components has satisfied the conditions for a high sensitivity circuit and radio frequency-to-direct current (RF-to-DC) power conversion. Actual experiments showed that the proposed power processing circuit could operate with an incident power as low as −50 dBm. It has been found that the proposed harvesting system stored 0.11 J in a 200 mF supercapacitor as the storage device in 20 hours of the experimentation periods. Moreover, actual results for the overall energy harvesting system is compared with previous research, and it has been found that the proposed system has advantages over the listed works