Vibration energy harvesters for wireless sensor networks for aircraft health monitoring

Abstract

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.

Design and optimization of lightweight bending strain energy harvesters using irradiation cross-linked polypropylene ferroelectret

“…As pointed out, the detailed design strongly depends on the excitation amplitude. The latter differs considerably depending on different load scenarios like smooth or rough cruise or under gust excitation [3,43,44] and further on the exact positioning of the EH. For this work, the excitation in [3] is applied as it leads to a fairly conservative and therefore more reliable estimation of the power output.…”

Wireless Connectivity in Airplanes: Challenges and the Case for UWB

“…Given the particularities of the aircraft environment, thermoelectric harvesters are posed as a promising solution given their mature technology, the lack of moving parts, and their large commercial offer [31]. Other energy sources like vibration [17] and aircraftspecific sources [32]- [36] are considered as well in addition to mixed schemes [37] and multiple source harvesting [38]. In particular, a generalization of the multisource concept [38] to other energy sources has the potential to completely remove batteries.…”

“…The third main area of focus should quantify the energy harvesting perspectives inside the airplanes. The next steps in this topic follow two directions: first, the power consumption of the nodes under regular operation as well as the power that can be harvested within the aircraft need to be measured and optimized, which is currently a very active topic from the source perspective [17], [32]- [36], [67]; second, network protocols need to be re-designed to account for the amount and availability characteristics of the available energy supplies. While this is a rather mature research field, its particularization for the aeronautical industry is not straightforward.…”