Opportunities for energy harvesting in automobile factories

This paper investigates the opportunities of deploying distributed sensors within the manufacturing environment of a large scale automobile plant using energy harvesting techniques. Measurements were taken in three domains at the plant in order to characterize ambient energy. Due to the location of the plant, the RF power density for radio access technologies present varied between -127 dBm/cm2 and -113 dBm/cm2. The maximum temperature difference measured within accessible distance from machine parts on the production lines surveyed was 10°C. Indoor lighting was dominant at the plant via fluorescent tubes, with average irradiance of 1 W/m2. The results obtained from this measurement campaign showed that indoor lighting was the most suitable ambient source for energy harvesting.

[1]  Kevin Fu,et al.  On the limits of effective hybrid micro-energy harvesting on mobile CRFID sensors , 2010, MobiSys '10.

[2]  Gil Zussman,et al.  Networking Low-Power Energy Harvesting Devices: Measurements and Algorithms , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

[3]  Siriwat Soontaranon,et al.  Micropower energy harvesting using poly(vinylidene fluoride hexafluoropropylene) , 2013 .

[4]  Mohammed Ismail,et al.  Characterization of Human Body-Based Thermal and Vibration Energy Harvesting for Wearable Devices , 2014, IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems.

[5]  R. M. Edwards,et al.  RF power density measurements for RF energy harvesting in automobile factories , 2015, 2015 Loughborough Antennas & Propagation Conference (LAPC).

[6]  Luca Gammaitoni,et al.  A real vibration database for kinetic energy harvesting application , 2012 .

[7]  R. M. Edwards,et al.  Evaluating 2-D grid interpolation techniques for predicting ambient RF power density in automobile factories , 2016, 2016 10th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP).

[8]  J.A.C. Theeuwes,et al.  Ambient RF Energy Scavenging: GSM and WLAN Power Density Measurements , 2008, 2008 38th European Microwave Conference.

[9]  Gil Zussman,et al.  Movers and Shakers: Kinetic Energy Harvesting for the Internet of Things , 2013, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[10]  Kazusuke Maenaka,et al.  The Availability and Statistical Properties of Ambient Light for Energy-Harvesting for Wearable Sensor Nodes , 2012 .

[11]  P. D. Mitcheson,et al.  Ambient RF Energy Harvesting in Urban and Semi-Urban Environments , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.

[12]  J. M. Gilbert,et al.  Comparison of energy harvesting systems for wireless sensor networks , 2008, Int. J. Autom. Comput..

[13]  C. Van Hoof,et al.  Body-Heat Powered Autonomous Pulse Oximeter , 2006, 2006 5th IEEE Conference on Sensors.

[14]  Gil Zussman,et al.  Movers and Shakers: Kinetic Energy Harvesting for the Internet of Things , 2015, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[15]  Joseph W. Matiko,et al.  Review of the application of energy harvesting in buildings , 2013 .

[16]  S Mancini,et al.  Definition and development of an automatic procedure for narrowband measurements. , 2001, Radiation protection dosimetry.

[17]  Hubregt J. Visser,et al.  RF Energy Harvesting and Transport for Wireless Sensor Network Applications: Principles and Requirements , 2013, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[18]  Reha Denker,et al.  Feasibility analysis and proof of concept for thermoelectric energy harvesting in mobile computers , 2013 .

[19]  Chi-Chih Chen,et al.  Design of an efficient ambient WiFi energy harvesting system , 2012 .

[20]  Xiangyun Zhou,et al.  Cutting the last wires for mobile communications by microwave power transfer , 2014, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[21]  Regan Zane,et al.  Scalable RF Energy Harvesting , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.

[22]  Mani Srivastava,et al.  Energy-aware wireless microsensor networks , 2002, IEEE Signal Process. Mag..