Comparison of energy harvesting systems for wireless sensor networks

By James M. Gilbert, F. Balouchi. International Journal of Automation and Computing, 2008

384 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) offer an attractive solution to many environmental, security, and process monitoring problems. However, one barrier to their fuller adoption is the need to supply electrical power over extended periods of time without the need for dedicated wiring. Energy harvesting provides a potential solution to this problem in many applications. This paper reviews the characteristics and energy requirements of typical sensor network nodes, assesses a range of potential ambient energy sources, and outlines the characteristics of a wide range of energy conversion devices. It then proposes a method to compare these diverse sources and conversion mechanisms in terms of their normalised power density.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ad006c911fe61f04c663508a7d82ff7bb2ecfa8b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

In Mechanical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Energy Harvesting from Highly Unsteady Fluid Flows using Piezoelectric Materials (2010, background): “Detailed surveys of the current state of the technology are presented by Paradiso and Starner (2005), Gilbert and Balouchi (2008), and Mitcheson et al. (2008).”
Energy harvesting by means of flow-induced vibrations on aerospace vehicles (2016, background): “In addition, consumption depends on the operating mode of a device such as whether it uses sleep mode to reduce consumption and how frequently it transmits and receives data [166].”
Review of the application of energy harvesting in buildings (2013, background): “Gilbert et al [23] reviewed the characteristics and energy requirements of typical sensor nodes and assessed a range of potential ambient energy sources and ambient energy harvesting devices.”
Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Devices: An Alternative Energy Source for Wireless Sensors (2012, background): “With a well managed power control management, an ideal wireless sensor node has a power consumption of about 100 μW for a life time operation [3, 5, 21, 22].”
Performance of III–V Solar Cells as Indoor Light Energy Harvesters (2016, neutral): “to powering IoT devices [2].”
Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks (EH-WSNs) (2018, background): “Therefore, thermal energy harvesters are more suitable for large scale power generation such as steam turbines (Gilbert and Balouchi 2008; Shaikh and Zeadally 2016b).”