Energy harvesting for sensors in infrastructure monitoring and maintenance

Abstract

Infrastructure monitoring and maintenance needs various kinds of sensors; all these sensors are expected to have long lifetime and self- maintenance and not be replaced. For non-destructive infrastructure monitoring, these sensors should be wireless, however, wireless sensors have an inherent problem on energy efficiency and energy consumption. Thus, how to power sensors efficiently or how to design a self-powered sensor is a key issue to this problem. Energy harvesting technique emerges as a new direction on getting power from environment. Piezoelectric and electromagnetic harvesting methods on vibration are analysed in this paper, and a low cost self-powered conversion circuit is modelled and simulated. Other kinds of energy harvesting are also briefly compared with those two methods; the solar-electric, vibration-electric, thermal-electric and electromagnetic-electric energy harvesting methods are briefly compared in this paper.