A preliminary study of thermal energy harvesting for industrial wireless sensor networks

The energy-constrained battery has become one key issue that hinders the application of industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs). Energy harvesting is a promising solution for this problem. After comparing several energy harvesting approaches, thermoelectric energy harvesting for IWSNs is explored in this paper. The behavior of commercial thermoelectric module is analyzed based on its finite element analysis models. The corresponding experimental setup including thermoelectric module, conversion circuits, and sensor node is then built up and evaluated. To tackle the problem of current design, the future work and possible solutions are discussed as well.