Energy harvesting for remote monitoring of environmental applications / Panu Thainiramit

Abstract

The number of residential buildings in many countries around the world has been growing rapidly. Comfortable furniture and smart peripheral devices have become commonly used in daily life. This dissertation demonstrated a simple wireless standalone system for the case of the receiver attached to the compressor unit of the conventional air conditioner. The research proposed an air-compressor as a source of discrete excitation and employed a conventional buzzer as a transducer. The vibration is harvested as its mechanical energy to electricity by using a beam structure (cantilever beam) glued with the piezoelectric ceramic. The output energy stored in capacitors is consequent as a miniature generator. The transmitted data are then received a wireless receiver from the remote transmitter. Moreover, the potential result for charging the rechargeable battery appears to illustrate that the harvesting structure requires more electricity to consume the enhancement circuit by providing a high magnitude of vibrations following the threshold FoM parameter after saturated power ranges. As a result, the piezoelectric material generates a trickle current for charging the rechargeable battery, capacity 150 mAh, thus being fully charged within 40 hours. These results confirmed that the simple beam could act as a charger for the connected capacitors which were later an energy source to feed the wireless devices even though there is only a standard circuit by controlling the on/off state of a simple switch between the receiver module. In this research, a running air-conditioner generated a charging cycle to capacitors of 3,150 μF within 1 hour. It is truly enough to send and receive the data of ambient temperature around the building. This application is useful as a warning sign for inhabitants.