Abstract
This paper presents an energetically autonomous IoT sensor powered via thermoelectric harvesting. The operation of thermal harvesting is based on maintaining a temperature gradient of at least 26.31 K between the thermoelectric-generator sides. While the hot side employs a metal plate, the cold side is attached with a phase-change material acting as an effective passive dissipative material. The desired temperature gradient allows claiming power conversion efficiencies of about 26.43%, without efficiency reductions associated with heating and soiling. This work presents the characterization of a low-cost off-the-shelf thermoelectric generator that allows estimating the production of at least 407.3 mW corresponding to 2.44 Wh of available energy considering specific operation hours—determined statistically for a given geographic location. Then, the energy production is experimentally verified with the construction of an outdoor IoT sensor powered by a passively-cooled thermoelectric generator. The prototype contains a low-power microcontroller, environmental sensors, and a low-power radio to report selected environmental variables to a central node. This work shows that the proposed supply mechanism provides sufficient energy for continuous operation even during times with no solar resource through an on-board Li-Po battery. Such a battery can be recharged once the solar radiation is available without compromising sensor operation.
Highlights
Smart city initiatives are supported by the effort of the Internet of Things (IoT) to improve the quality of life of citizens by gathering information about education, energy, healthcare, public transportation, employment, among others [1]
This paper has shown a complete energy harvesting system withand passive cooling that supports
This paper has shown a complete energy harvesting system with passive cooling that supports electrical parameters
Summary
Smart city initiatives are supported by the effort of the Internet of Things (IoT) to improve the quality of life of citizens by gathering information about education, energy, healthcare, public transportation, employment, among others [1]. With the principle of interconnected people and objects, IoT applications collect the target information from autonomous devices and allow communication among machines, which makes information available on-demand in a centralized system like the Internet. To guarantee a continuous operation, challenges such as low power consumption, low cost, low range of transmission, and ease deployment must be tackled for successful IoT implementation. The design of low power microcontrollers represents an improvement for minimizing the energy consumption of IoT devices. The power supply can be a battery, which is simple to implement, but available rechargeable battery technologies have low specific capacity [2].
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