Solar Energy Harvesting and Software Enhancements for Autonomous Wireless Smart Sensor Networks

Civil infrastructure is the backbone of modern society; maintaining this infrastructure is critical for a healthy society. Wireless smart sensors (WSSs) provide an effective means to monitor the performance of buildings and bridges, with the goal of improving maintenance practices, minimizing the costs of repair, and increasing public safety. WSSs, traditionally powered by batteries, are limited in terms of the length of time they can operate autonomously. The frequent need to change batteries can drive up maintenance costs and diminish the advantage envisioned with WSSs. Efforts have been made to minimize the power consumption of WSSs used for structural health monitoring (SHM); however, only a limited number of alternative power supply options, such as energy harvesting, have been used in full-scale SHM applications. This research develops a solar energy harvesting system to provide power to the Imote2 WSS platform and increases the long-term autonomy of wireless smart sensor networks (WSSNs). The approach is validated on a cable stayed bridge in South Korea. Additionally, software enhancements are introduced to allow sensor data to be stored in non-volatile memory, potentially further enhancing the efficacy of WSSNs. This research has resulted in greater overall autonomy of WSSNs