A Vibration-Powered Wireless Sensor Device for Machine Conditioning

Abstract

Preventive maintenance is commonly accepted as an economical solution to prevent production stops. Machine conditioning may offer data, allowing a reduced frequency of maintenance. However, these machine conditioning sensors have to be maintained themselves, reducing users’ confidence in the data. It may also make machine conditioning monitoring economically infeasible in some applications.

Vibration-based energy harvesting may provide a reliable and, most importantly, low maintenance energy source for such machine conditioning sensors. In this project we designed and evaluated the implementation of a vibration-logging wireless sensor device, transmitting over Bluetooth Low Energy 5, and powered by a commercially available electrodynamic vibration generator.

The results show that it is reasonable to expect a usable power output of around 0.1 to 6mW, greatly depending on the vibration source. This amount of power enables microcontroller-based designs to operate indefinitely. However, the technology is limited by the low bandwidth of contemporary generators, making vibration-based energy harvesting difficult to implement. While vibration-based energy harvesting shows promise, it requires thorough investigations to be able to conclude whether an application is suitable for the technology.