On Harvesting Energy from Tree Trunks for Environmental Monitoring

Cleonilson P. Souza, Fabrício B. S. Carvalho, Filype A. N. Silva, Hening A. Andrade, Nathália de V. Silva, Orlando Baiocchi and Ivan Müller

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 2016, vol. 12, issue 6, 9383765

Abstract: This work describes an experimental study on the possibilities of harvesting energy from tree trunks in order to power sensor nodes for environmental monitoring, particularly in wild forests. As the trunk of a living tree can be divided into isothermal subvolumes, which are generally referred to as annual rings, and the trunk is a good heat storage material, depending on the tree dimensions and its species, it can potentially offer different temperature gradients according to the tree trunk depths. The hypothesis is to consider the application of this temperature gradient on the faces of a Peltier cell to obtain electrical energy. In order to evaluate this hypothesis, a wireless sensor network was developed for measuring internal temperature of trunks from different trees. The experimental results show that it is possible to obtain a sufficient temperature gradient to harvest energy from tree trunks. Additionally, it is also shown that it is possible to harvest thermal energy during the day and during the night while photovoltaic cell only works under sunlight.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1155/2016/9383765 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:intdis:v:12:y:2016:i:6:p:9383765

DOI: 10.1155/2016/9383765

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().