Autonomous Wireless Sensor Node with Thermal Energy Harvesting for Temperature Monitoring of Industrial Devices

The feasibility of using thermal energy harvesting to power a wireless sensor node for temperature monitoring of industrial devices is explored and evaluated in this paper. The thermal energy harvesting equipment and energy conversion circuit have been designed and fabricated. A series of experiments with various sleep periods for the sensor node are undertaken. The experimental results show that the thermal energy harvesting equipment and energy conversion circuit are able to power a commercial wireless node when the sleep period of the node is more than 16s, equating to a duty cycle of 5.4%. The results also indicate that the wireless sensor network based on the proposed autonomous wireless sensor node can monitor the industrial device temperature successfully.