Energy harvesting technologies are now established in the renewable energy market and various demonstrators, prototypes and products are on view this week at the IDTechEx Energy Harvesting and Storage Conference and Exhibition at Boston in the US.
Avnet will be demonstrating its activities in energy harvesting and wireless sensor networks by giving two separate demos that include energy harvesting nodes, one of which is a 2.4GHz sensor network with nodes powered solely by thermal, vibration, light and RF induction.
Mide, an engineering company that develops, produces, and markets smart technology products and materials will have a complete energy harvesting sensor system operating, utilising the Volture piezo-electric harvester developed by the company.
It will harvest vibration energy from a small vibration source, power a microprocessor to take temperature measurements and send them wirelessly to a remote laptop.
Cymbet is a developer of thin battery technology, its demonstrators including a demo with Dust Networks using solar harvesting to power an IPV6 based wireless router.
“This is the first time ultra-low power technologies have converged in order to achieve this,” said the company.
Cymbet will also have wireless sensor demos with Micropelt (thermal harvesting ), Mide (vibration energy harvesting) and RF wireless power with PowerCast.
“The SmartMesh product family provides a unique convergence with energy harvesting because all of their mesh network nodes can run on harvested energy,” said Burkhard Habbe, vice-president of business development for Micropelt.
“With the further decreased power requirements of Dust’s new SmartMesh IP technology we can now run even more applications on thermal harvesters at rather low gradients, eliminating both wires and battery maintenance.”
The Fraunhoffer ISS will also have several working demos which will be several wireless sensors powered by thermal gradients and vibrations.
KCF technologies will be featuring their heat-harvesting technology in a small device attached to a hot plate and then powering a wireless vibration sensor, but will also display their solar harvesting technology in a small device situated in front of a 2,000-lumen light and wirelessly powering vibration sensors.
There was also a chance to see the ElectraFlyer e-trike, a manned aerial vehicle utilising regenerative soaring. Randall Fishman from ElectaFlyer also described the development of regenerative soaring during the conference sessions, highlighting the possibility of solar heating and regenerative soaring as power supply sources for aviation, avoiding the need to charge from grid connected power stations.
He will also be discussing the concept of the “photovoltaic hangar as a ground-charging suite for an electric airplane”.
IDTechEx Conference & Exhibition