TITLE:
Autonomous Wireless Sensors Network Based on Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting
AUTHORS:
Alex Mouapi, Nadir Hakem, Gilles Y. Delisle
KEYWORDS:
WSN, Self-Powering, PEHS, Packet Size, Duty Cycle, Energy Harvesting System
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Antennas and Propagation,
Vol.4 No.3,
September
21,
2016
ABSTRACT: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) offer an attractive solution to many environmental,
security and process monitoring. However, their lifetime remains very limited by
battery capacity. Through the use of piezoelectric energy harvesting techniques, ambient
vibration can be captured and converted into usable electricity to create selfpowering
WSN which is not limited by finite battery energy. This paper investigates
analytically and experimentally the performance of a WSN powered by a Piezoelectric
Energy Harvesting System (PEHS) and a material block-level modeling considering
most key energy consumption of a wireless sensor node in a star topology
network is proposed. By using real hardware parameters of existing components, the
proposed model is used to evaluate the energetic budget of the node. The sensor
node performance is evaluated regarding transmit packet size, duty cycle and the
number of nodes that can be deployed. From the spectral properties of the available
vibration inside two moving vehicles (automobile and train), the maximal recoverable
power for each type of vehicle is estimated. Using a PEHS based on a cantilever
beam optimized for low-frequency applications, 6 mW power is recovered in the case
of the train while a 12.5 mW power is reached in the case of the automobile. It is observed
that the sink may not operate with the recovered energy. However, the sensor
node can sense and transmit data with a maximum size of 105.5 kbits when the duty
cycle is 4 × 10-15. It is also achieved that the node is most effective when the measured
physical phenomena vary slowly, such as the variations in temperature due to
thermal inertia. Considering an optimized PEHS based on non-linear processing, it is
shown that the sink can operate for 190% improvement of the recovered power.