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 constrain 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 16 s, which represents a duty cycle of 5.4%.

Keywords

• Wireless sensor networks
• energy harvesting
• thermoelectric generator
• Internet of Things
• temperature monitoring