Journal article
Harvest Energy from the Water: A Self-Sustained Wireless Water Quality Sensing System
ACM transactions on embedded computing systems, Vol.17(1), pp.1-24
01/12/2018
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/121066
Abstract
Water quality data is incredibly important and valuable, but its acquisition is not always trivial. A promising solution is to distribute a wireless sensor network in water to measure and collect the data; however, a drawback exists in that the batteries of the system must be replaced or recharged after being exhausted. To mitigate this issue, we designed a self-sustained water quality sensing system that is powered by renewable bioenergy generated from microbial fuel cells (MFCs). MFCs collect the energy released from native magnesium oxidizing microorganisms (MOMs) that are abundant in natural waters. The proposed energy-harvesting technology is environmentally friendly and can provide maintenance-free power to sensors for several years. Despite these benefits, an MFC can only provide microwatt-level power that is not sufficient to continuously power a sensor. To address this issue, we designed a power management module to accumulate energy when the input voltage is as low as 0.33V. We also proposed a radio-frequency (RF) activation technique to remotely activate sensors that otherwise are switched off in default. With this innovative technique, a sensor’s energy consumption in sleep mode can be completely avoided. Additionally, this design can enable on-demand data acquisitions from sensors. We implement the proposed system and evaluate its performance in a stream. In 3-month field experiments, we find the system is able to reliably collect water quality data and is robust to environment changes.
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Details
- Title
- Harvest Energy from the Water
- Creators
- Qi Chen - Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, USAYe Liu - Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, P.R. ChinaGuangchi Liu - Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, USAQing Yang - Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, USAXianming Shi - Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USAHongwei Gao - Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, USALu Su - State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NYQuanlong Li - Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, Heilongjiang, P.R. China
- Publication Details
- ACM transactions on embedded computing systems, Vol.17(1), pp.1-24
- Academic Unit
- Civil and Environmental Engineering, Department of
- Identifiers
- 99900612853801842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article