Design and Experiment of Energy Harvesting Power Supply for Wireless Sensor Network in Freight Train Monitoring

Abstract

The freight train plays a significant role in transportation of many countries, and its capacity increases constantly. The safety of freight train is important issue to support transportation efficiency. One safety management method is the monitoring of the health state of a train car using wireless sensing technology. Unfortunately, there is no power supply for sensing devices in a freight train. Therefore, it is necessary to harvest electric power. Available energy sources are wind and/or vibration that occur during running the train car. This paper will focus on the energy supply method for the wireless sensor network using wind as energy source for monitoring the safe operation of the freight train. This paper suggests the design and implementation method of a wind energy harvester for wireless sensor devices that monitor temperature and vibration in bogies in real time. Additionally, a sensitive analysis for optimal fan and blades will be investigated based on a computational fluid dynamic computation.