Energy Harvesting Technologies for Achieving Self-Powered Wireless Sensor Networks in Machine Condition Monitoring: A Review

Abstract

Condition monitoring can reduce machine breakdown losses, increase productivity and operation safety, and therefore deliver significant benefits to many industries. The emergence of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with smart processing ability play an ever-growing role in online condition monitoring of machines. WSNs are cost-effective networking systems for machine condition monitoring. It avoids cable usage and eases system deployment in industry, which leads to significant savings. Powering the nodes is one of the major challenges for a true WSN system, especially when positioned at inaccessible or dangerous locations and in harsh environments. Promising energy harvesting technologies have attracted the attention of engineers because they convert microwatt or milliwatt level power from the environment to implement maintenance-free machine condition monitoring systems with WSNs. The motivation of this review is to investigate the energy sources, stimulate the application of energy harvesting based WSNs, and evaluate the improvement of energy harvesting systems for mechanical condition monitoring. This paper overviews the principles of a number of energy harvesting technologies applicable to industrial machines by investigating the power consumption of WSNs and the potential energy sources in mechanical systems. Many models or prototypes with different features are reviewed, especially in the mechanical field. Energy harvesting technologies are evaluated for further development according to the comparison of their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, a discussion of the challenges and potential future research of energy harvesting systems powering WSNs for machine condition monitoring is made.

A New Green Prospective of Non-orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) for 5G

“…It is observed from the recent literature [44,[72][73][74][75][76][77] that with the advent of energy efficient techniques like energy harvesting, the resulting self-sustained networks are getting attention of the research community. Energy harvesting and transfer have recently taken the attention in the field of wireless communication networks as an energy efficient mechanism that leads to self-sustaining, cost-effective networks.…”

Comparison of FPGA and Microcontroller Implementations of an Innovative Method for Error Magnitude Evaluation in Reed–Solomon Codes

“…The board hosts a TI CC3200 system on chip (SoC) device, with a 32-bit architecture ARM Cortex-M4 MCU clocked at 80 MHz. This device, thanks to an embedded Wi-Fi radio module, is widely used to implement devices and systems compatible with the Internet of Things and wireless sensor network paradigms [42][43][44][45][46][47], topics in which error correction techniques were demonstrated to gain an advantage in recent implementations [48,49]. Data about execution speeds were collected by measuring a general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pin voltage, which was toggled inside the C code at the computation's start and end.…”

Magnetic and Electric Energy Harvesting Technologies in Power Grids: A Review

“…Until now, EH has been widely used to provide power supplies for sensor nodes in structural health monitoring, medical implantable devices, military monitoring devices, remote weather stations or large-scale renewable energy generation [14]. Therein, the most prominent application is to energize wireless sensors [15,16]. For instance, the magneto-mechano-triboelectric generator was designed using piezoelectric and magnetostrictive materials, which convert magnetic noise to useful electric energy applying for low-power consuming electronics or wireless sensor networks [17][18][19].…”