Traditional power supply for wireless sensor nodes is batteries. However, the
application of batteries in WSN has been limited due to their large size, low
capacity, limited working life, and replacement cost.
With rapid advancements in microelectronics, power consumption of WSN is
getting lower and hence the energy harvested from ambient may be sufficient to
power the tiny sensor nodes and eliminate batteries completely.
As vibration is the widespread ambient source that exists in abundance on an
aircraft, a WSN node system used for aircraft health monitoring powered by a
piezoelectric energy harvester was designed and manufactured.
Furthermore, simulations were performed to validate the design and evaluate
the performance.
In addition, the Z-Stack protocol was migrated to run on the system and initial
experiments were carried out to analyse the current consumption of the system.
A new approach for power management was reported, the execution of the
operations were determined by the amount of the energy stored on the
capacitor. A novel power saving interface was also developed to minimise the
power consumption during the voltage measurement
