Practical Implementation of a Novel Wind Energy Harvesting Network

This paper describes a demonstration wireless sensor network consisting of 24 self-powered nodes that harvest energy from airflow, utilizing a novel wind energy harvester. Although the main application for the technology is for fitting to ducted air systems for building health monitoring applications, this demonstrator showcases the various technologies in a more direct manner, by using energy harvested throughout the day in intensive periods of high power operation, (as sensor networks would), in this case by lighting LEDs. This provides a visible and dynamic introduction to the nature of wireless networks and makes it easy to see the operation of the network. Further we can report on the long term testing of this network, as it has been running continuously for over a year