A pressure-based energy harvester for powering the environmental Internet of Things

Abstract

As the Internet of Things expands to more locations across our planet than ever before, sensors are being deployed to environments which were once inhospitable to both humans and electrical devices. As this expansion takes place, there is becoming a great need for novel sources of electrical power for devices situated in these types of remote locations. In this thesis, a thermal energy harvester is designed which is able to harvest energy from the diurnal variations in temperature present in most environments on earth. A novel actuator is designed, which is able to utilise the phase-change characteristics of a range of gases to generate a variable linear force from different thermal gradients. This is combined with an electrical energy converter, which is able to mechanically store the energy from this linear movement and convert it to a burst of electrical energy. These two components are then integrated with an example energy harvesting device, which is able to utilise this source of energy to send sensor data over a radio link. A number of tuneable parameters are identified at each step which allow the complete energy harvesting system to be configured to operate in a number of different environments. With the design choices and construction process documented throughout, this thesis presents the results of tuneable energy harvesting system which is capable of generating up to 150 mJ per day from diurnal temperature variation, which can be utilised to send up to three LoRaWAN transmissions of sensor data from an example device.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Joshua Curry: orcid.org/0000-0003-1065-8490

ORCID for Nicholas Harris: orcid.org/0000-0003-4122-2219

ORCID for Neil White: orcid.org/0000-0003-1532-6452

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