Vibration Converter with Passive Energy Management for Battery-Less Wireless Sensor Nodes in Predictive Maintenance

Sonia Bradai, Ghada Bouattour, Dhouha El Houssaini and Olfa Kanoun
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Sonia Bradai: Measurement and Sensor Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Chemnitz University of Technology, 09111 Chemnitz, Germany
Ghada Bouattour: Measurement and Sensor Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Chemnitz University of Technology, 09111 Chemnitz, Germany
Dhouha El Houssaini: Measurement and Sensor Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Chemnitz University of Technology, 09111 Chemnitz, Germany
Olfa Kanoun: Measurement and Sensor Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Chemnitz University of Technology, 09111 Chemnitz, Germany

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 6, 1-17

Abstract: Predictive maintenance is becoming increasingly important in industry and requires continuous monitoring to prevent failures and anticipate maintenance processes, resulting in reduced downtime. Vibration is often used for failure detection and equipment conditioning as it is well correlated to the machine’s operation and its variation is an indicator of process changes. In this context, we propose a novel energy-autonomous wireless sensor system that is able to measure without the use of batteries and automatically deliver alerts once the machine has an anomaly by the variation in acceleration. For this, we designed a wideband electromagnetic energy harvester and realized passive energy management to supply a wireless sensor node, which does not need an external energy supply. The advantage of the solution is that the designed circuit is able to detect the failure without the use of additional sensors, but by the Analog Digital Converter (ADC) of the Wireless Sensor Nodes (WSN) themselves, which makes it more compact and have lower energy consumption. The electromagnetic converter can harvest the relevant energy levels from weak vibration, with an acceleration of 0.1 g for a frequency bandwidth of 7 Hz. Further, the energy-management circuit enabled fast recharging of the super capacitor on a maximum of 31 s. The designed energy-management circuit consists of a six-stage voltage multiplier circuit connected to a wide-band DC-DC converter, as well as an under-voltage lock-out (UVLO) circuit to connect to the storage device to the WSN. In the failure condition with a frequency of 13 Hz and an acceleration of 0.3 g, the super capacitor recharging time was estimated to be 24 s. The proposed solution was validated by implementing real failure detection scenarios with random acceleration levels and, alternatively, modus. The results show that the WSN can directly measure the harvester’s response and decide about the occurrence of failure based on its characteristic threshold voltage without the use of an additional sensor.

Keywords: energy harvesting; autonomous wireless sensor; passive energy management; weak vibration; electromagnetic converter; wideband; planar spring; voltage multiplier; rectifier; predictive maintenance; failure detection; WSN (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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