Autonomous Energy Management system achieving piezoelectric energy harvesting in Wireless Sensors

TL;DR

This paper introduces an autonomous energy management system for wireless sensors that utilizes piezoelectric energy harvesting, employing PID control and MCU to optimize sensor operation and extend lifespan.

Contribution

It presents a novel self-management approach combining PID control and MCU to enhance energy harvesting efficiency in wireless sensor networks.

Findings

Improved energy harvesting efficiency using piezoelectric materials.

Extended sensor operational lifetime without battery replacement.

Effective mode control of sensors via PID-tuned energy management.

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are extensively used in monitoring applications such as humidity and temperature sensing in smart buildings, industrial automation, and predicting crop health. Sensor nodes are deployed in remote places to sense the data information from the environment and to transmit the sensing data to the Base Station (BS). When a sensor is drained of energy, it can no longer achieve its role without a substituted source of energy. However, limited energy in a sensor's battery prevents the long-term process in such applications. In addition, replacing the sensors' batteries and redeploying the sensors is very expensive in terms of time and budget. To overcome the energy limitation without changing the size of sensors, researchers have proposed the use of energy harvesting to reload the rechargeable battery by power. Therefore, efficient power management is required to increase the benefits of having additional environmental energy. This paper presents a new self-management of energy based on Proportional Integral Derivative controller (PID) to tune the energy harvesting and Microprocessor Controller Unit (MCU) to control the sensor modes.