Power conditioner, wireless sensor nodes and IoT-Platform

Based on a first and more fundamental experimental and characterization work on the two different types of generators (PEG & TEG) the Work Package 6 Team members -Aimen, ICCS, PhontonFirst and Smart Material- began with their development work on novel approaches regarding the power conditioner circuit, low energy MEMS sensor node, fiber optics sensors and the IoT interface.

In could be shown that using an intelligent power conditioner circuit which permanently monitors the energy stored in the first buffer and the system buffer (later the super cap from WP4) the energy transfer time towards this capacitor will be reduced from 9 seconds to only 2.4 seconds for the same amount of energy (Fig. 1)

Figure 1: Improvement of energy transfer

Within the second major topic Aimen was working on new strategies for a further reduction of the energy consumption of their developed MEMS-based wireless sensor node. Due to some major changes in the boot routine and a simplified Bluetooth-LE transmission protocol together with a remarkable miniaturization, as shown in Fig. 2, the energy needs for sending one data set could be reduced from formerly 165mJ to only less than 29mJ.

Figure 2: Improved MEMS based sensor node design

Once the sensor data were gathered and transmitted ICCS was working on all needed parts for the digital backend to visualize those data within an IoT platform. Fig. 3 is showing the corresponding architecture of the complete system.

Figure 3: Architecture of the system dataflow

The IoT Gateway, the open source software platform EdgeXFoundry and the MQTT Broker form a system that provides simultaneously both high performance and low energy consumption.