Sustainable solar powered battery-free wireless sensing for food cold chain management

Abstract

Green, sustainable and non-stop wireless sensing is not only one of the critical issues in the widespread applications of wireless sensing to guarantee the food quality and safety in cold chain, but also one of the important ways to improve the sustainability of the food cold chain. The aim of this paper is to propose and develop a sustainable solar powered battery-free sensing system for food cold chain management. The system includes the sustainable solar energy harvesting layer, battery-free wireless sensing layer and remote monitoring and management center. The sustainable solar power performance, battery-free wireless sensing performance, energy consumption performance, emergy based sustainability performance and the system evaluation performance of the sustainable solar powered battery-free wireless sensing system were analyzed and evaluated. The proposed and developed sustainable solar powered battery-free sensing system could reduce the average energy consumption by 87.04%, the cost by 15.3% and increase the greening, sustainability and non-stop monitoring of the food cold chain by comparing with the battery powered wireless sensing system. This study could also provide some theoretical and experimental methods for the other food non-stop monitoring in cold chain to improve the sustainable development and ensure the food quality and safety. It is also possible to integrate more different sensors for non-stop cold chain battery-free wireless sensing.