Environmental Thermal Energy Scavenging Powered Wireless Sensor Network for Building Monitoring

Abstract

In recent years there has been increasing interest in innovative design and construction of sustainable highperformance buildings. Among the innovative techniques proposed to increase building performance is to dynamically sense, control and manage the ambient building environment, such as temperature, humidity, air quality, artificial lighting, etc. through the installation of a distributed wireless sensor network (WSN). It has been reported that such an intelligent building monitor and control system can result in an approximately 20% savings in energy usage, a substantial step toward the realization of smart building management. In conventional WSNs, battery power is used to energize these micro-scale sensors. The small space permitted for battery integration in these miniaturized systems is a limiting factor. The small battery will be quickly depleted requiring frequent battery replacement or the WSN system will cease operation. Frequent battery replacement is impractical due to the tremendous number of sensor nodes embedded in a typical WSN system. This key design challenge in WSN based building monitoring and control must be overcome in order to significantly prolong the life of the overall system operation. In this paper, the authors investigate the construction of a novel WSN system for intelligent building environment monitoring powered through the use of micro-scale thermoelectric generators (TEG). In the TEG, the ambient thermal gradient between two surfaces of the device is converted into electrical energy. To verify the feasibility of the proposed idea, an experiment was conducted and the results demonstrated the concept of harvesting ambient thermal energy to power wireless sensors.

Thermoelectric generator experimental performance testing for wireless sensor network application in smart buildings

“…One side of the module is to be the hot side where heat is applied, while the other side is called the cold side where heat gets dissipated or rejected, Figure 1 below shows a schematic of a TEG module. [3,4] The generated voltage from a TEG is directly proportional to the temperature difference between both sides of the module and the Seebeck coefficient of the material used is shown in Equation 1.…”

Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting for Building Energy Management Wireless Sensor Networks

“…The TEG generated power is measured at 0.95 mW with a 4 ∘ C temperature difference in this work, whilst in [35], 0.2 mW is generated with a 3.5 ∘ C temperature difference. In addition to the higher output power, the bulk Time interval between two WSN mote measurements (s) Figure 22: Thermoelectric energy harvester prototype charging supercapacitor.…”

An Event-Triggered Online Energy Management Algorithm of Smart Home: Lyapunov Optimization Approach

“…As time goes on, the controllable load queues evolve based on Equation (13). The problem can be expressed as: (7) and (11), controllable load queues are mean rate stable ∀i, t.…”

“…The original problem Equation (20) is transformed into the following problem by minimizing the right-hand side of Equation (30). (7) and (11), ∀i, t.…”

“…An important way to improve the operation utility of households is through a Home Energy Management System (HEMS) [6]. It is employed to collect data from household appliances using smart meters and sensors [7] and then to optimize power supply and management with this information [8,9]. It is expected to guarantee economic efficiency and operation security in households.…”