Thermal Energy Harvesting WSNs Node for Temperature Monitoring in IIoT
ABSTRACT
As the backbone of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are generally powered by batteries with limited energy, which constrains the continuous operations of WSNs and IIoT. Energy harvesting is a promising solution for this problem. Industrial plants have many hot pipelines or walls, and the temperature is one of the critical parameters to be monitored in industrial processes. This paper developed a novel thermal energy harvesting WSN node for temperature monitoring in IIoT. The feasibility of the presented self-powered WSN node is experimentally verified for a range of different sleep periods of the device. These results demonstrate that the designed boost circuit has an energy conversion rate of about 27%, and the proposed thermal energy harvester is able to indefinitely power a commercial WSN node when the sleep period of the device exceeds 16s, which represents a duty cycle of 5.4%.
EXISTING SYSTEM :
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) in industrial settings, and IIoT will play a vital role in transforming and updating traditional industries, and the enabling of smart manufacturing . Over the last few years, a variety of IIoT architectures and applications have been developed and reported by different researchers . As the backbone of IIoT, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) collect information from various physical objects and devices and then transmit the information to the Internet to link the virtual world and the real world . Generally, WSN nodes are powered by batteries with limited energy, which constrains the continuous operations of WSNs and IIoT. Although high capacity batteries, low power design , and on-sensor-node data processing will prolong WSN node lifetime, the key issue is that the node energy from batteries is limited.
PROPOSED SYSTEM :
Energy harvesting approaches using various energy sources, such as light , wind , thermal energy , and radio frequency (RF) signal , have been developed and presented in recent years. The selection of a suitable energy harvesting method needs to consider the setting of the WSNs application and the available energy. This project is focused on thermal energy harvesting in WSN node for temperature monitoring in IIoT because industrial plants have many hot pipelines or walls, even when there is insufficient light, wind, or RF signal power for energy harvesting, and because the temperature is one of the critical parameters to be monitored in industrial processes.
This paper extends that preliminary work, and gives more detailed descriptions on the related background, a broader background on thermal energy harvesting principles, descriptions of equivalent electronics circuits, an analysis of thermoelectric collector temperature distribution, and extended experimental validation and result analysis. The work in explores the possibility of an autonomous wireless temperature sensing node powered by a commercial TEG (Kryotherm TMG 127-1.0-2.5). However, this work does not use a commercial industrial temperature sensor. Instead, a simple low power conditioning circuit and radio transmitter are interfaced with a temperature sensor. This radio periodically sends the measurement information to a base station. This solution sacrifices the convenience and reliability of a commercial sensor node to achieve low power operation.
A self-powered thermal energy harvesting wireless sensor node for temperature measurement with a small, compact, and mechanically rigid structure is reported in . However, this system is based on a custom TEG, and a custom sensor node, and so it does not demonstrate that commercial sensors can be successfully powered by a TEG. In summary, some of the above-mentioned applications use simulation or model analysis of the proposed thermal energy harvester some examples measure the output power of the harvester to show its capability for powering the WSN node some papers use a LED as a load or a simple low power conditioning circuit and RF transmitter , while some systems use a custom designed TEG and sensor node , rather than a standard commercial WSN node, as the load of the thermal harvester to prove the self-powered possibility of the presented approach.
In this paper, a complete system is built to explore whether a commercial TEG without additional heat energy collector or storage can power a commercial WSN node with a useful duty cycle for temperature monitoring in IIoT.
CONCLUSIONS
A novel thermal energy harvesting WSN node for temperature monitoring in IIoT is proposed and described in this paper. The feasibility of the designed self-powered WSN node is verified by a set of experiments with a range of different sleep periods for the WSN node. The experimental results demonstrate that the energy conversion rate of the boost circuit is about 27%, and the proposed thermal energy harvester is able to power a commercial WSN node with an active period of 0.9s when the sleep period exceeds 16s, equivalent to a duty cycle of 5.4%. The result also demonstrates that the proposed WSN node can work autonomously and can monitor the temperature of the industrial equipment successfully.