Xavier Fernando
Digital Signal Processing
There are many applications of wireless sensor networks in smart homes such as detecting human presence, humidity, indoor and outdoor temperatures and lighting levels. However, a typical smart home such as the Archetype House, Kortright Centre, Vaughan has several hundreds of sensors. However, battery management of these sensors can be a costly and daunting task. A dead node might ruin benefit of the entire smart home arrangement. One way to make the sensors battery free is energy harvesting. Can energy be harvested from the electromagnetic energy radiating from AC power lines and use it for a low power device such as a wireless sensor network with a low duty-cycle? Few people have demonstrated this. What are the pros and cons of this approach? That is what we are going to investigate here.
To develop a wireless sensor network for a smart home. The nodes can be attached to the wall and harvest energy from the electrical lights beneath them. The sensor network shall detect human presence, humidity, smoke, CO, temperatures and lighting levels of the house and alert the residents when necessary.
1. Each sensor node shall harvest its own energy from the wall.
2. The sensors shall be connected using a wireless network.
3. Analog sensors such as the temperature, smoke, motion light intensity detectors shall be incorporated.
The energy harvesting set-up will need an electrical wire transmitting 5-10 A of current and few inductors from 5 to 15 H inductance. Such a detailed experiment is shown in https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~vikramg/docs/hotemnets11.pdf
The group is responsible for the successful completion of the overall project.
Student A is responsible for the energy harvesting portion.
Student B is responsible for the wireless networking and reporting portion.
Student C is responsible interfacing various sensors.
XF05: ENERGY FROM THE WALL | Xavier Fernando | Tuesday September 18th 2018 at 01:32 PM