Low power wireless monitoring system dual powered by piezoelectric transducers and solar cells

• Main Authors: Dadios, Laura Mae C., Encina, Stella Marie B., Recalde, Gabriel John D., Tomampoc, Odessah Marion G.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2012
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/14833
• Institution: De La Salle University

Piezoelectricity is electricity generated when a certain type of crystal or ceramic is applied with mechanical force. So far, piezoelectricity can be found in various appliances in the home, but it is seldom used as a direct source of energy in order to power up an entire system. Its study in the country is not well-explored compared to other alternative energy scavenging methods. In this paper, we make use of piezoelectric transducers and smaller solar cells as alternative sources of energy-scavenging for a sensor module system designed to collect and send data that records the temperature and relative humidity of the surroundings at a pre-determined schedule. The piezoelectric transducers integrated with solar cells will power the system, which has a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) in order to send the data from the nodes to the base station and to publish the gathered data via SMS. Each sensor node is comprised of the energy scavengers that will charge a battery that is connected to a microcontroller. The microcontroller is programmed to gather data from the connected temperature and relative humidity sensors, and it is scheduled to gather data so that it is able to save the energy being used by the system. The microcontroller is also connected to a Zigbee device which is the interface between the hardware and the software. The data received will be logged by a program developed using LabVIEW. Later on, the data received would be sent through a GSM Module so that it can be sent to cellphones and also be published in the Web.