Power harvesting for smart sensor networks in monitoring water distribution system

Abstract

Recently, there has been a growing interest in using wireless sensor networks for monitoring water distribution infrastructure to help drinking water utilities to have better understanding of hydraulic and water quality statement of their underground assets. One of the challenges is limited power resources for operating the smart sensors and sensor networks. Current common used power supplies for sensor node are batteries. Batteries have many drawbacks such as short life time and need to be replaced on regular basis which is uneconomical and unmanageable in hard access environment such as buried underground water pipelines. Energy harvesting of ambient energy in the water pipeline and powering wireless sensor node including sensing, processing, and communications would be particularly attractive option because the life time of the node will be potentially infinite for supporting wireless sensor networks. The paper will review and discuss the potential of using power harvesting techniques for monitoring water distribution networks and the work done in the area of monitoring water distribution systems using smart sensor networks.