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A Feasibility Study on Energy Harvesting from Soil Temperature Differences

Published: 04 November 2018 Publication History

Abstract

With regard to the growing number of wireless sensor network (WSN) and IoT long-term applications, energy harvesting becomes more and more popular i.a. due to the economical advantages compared to classical energy sources. Outdoor deployments for e.g. smart farming applications usually rely on solar-powered harvesters but this is not sufficient in any case. During previous outdoor deployments we observed, that soiling or shadowing by plants makes solar cells infeasible for ground-level sensors.
We also observed that thermoelectric generators (TEGs) might be an alternative when utilizing the temperature gradient between the ground and the soil. Hence, this paper presents a longterm measurement as well as a feasibility study whether a WSN could be supplied by this approach. We collected and analysed data of more than a year and show the total amount as well as the characteristics of harvestable energy.
Finally a load model of a typical WSN application is used to evaluate its performance and, therefore, to prove that energy harvesting from soil temperature differences is a realistic solution to power nodes and networks.

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  • (2024)Harvesting Energy From Soil-Air Temperature Differences for Batteryless IoT Devices: A Case StudyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.341465212(85306-85323)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Low Cost Low Power TEG Based Generator Including Passive Solar Tracking and Passive Cooling ProcessesElectric Power Components and Systems10.1080/15325008.2024.2349938(1-12)Online publication date: 10-May-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
RealWSN'18: Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Real-World Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks
November 2018
61 pages
ISBN:9781450360487
DOI:10.1145/3277883
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 04 November 2018

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Author Tags

  1. energy-harvesting
  2. thermometric generator

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Powering Agriculture IoT Sensors Using Natural Temperature Differences Between Air and Soil: Measurement and EvaluationSensors10.3390/s2423768724:23(7687)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Harvesting Energy From Soil-Air Temperature Differences for Batteryless IoT Devices: A Case StudyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.341465212(85306-85323)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Low Cost Low Power TEG Based Generator Including Passive Solar Tracking and Passive Cooling ProcessesElectric Power Components and Systems10.1080/15325008.2024.2349938(1-12)Online publication date: 10-May-2024
  • (2023)Batteryless Sensor Devices for Underground Infrastructure—A Long-Term Experiment on Urban Water PipesJournal of Low Power Electronics and Applications10.3390/jlpea1302003113:2(31)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Wireless Underground Sensor Networks: A Comprehensive Survey and TutorialACM Computing Surveys10.1145/362538856:4(1-44)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2023
  • (2023)A ±0.5-mV-Minimum-Input DC-DC Converter With Stepwise Adiabatic Gate-Drive and Efficient Timing Control for Thermoelectric Energy HarvestingIEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers10.1109/TCSI.2022.321940270:2(977-990)Online publication date: Feb-2023
  • (2023)Utilizing Natural Thermal Gradients as Micro Energy Sources for Wireless Sensor Networks2023 19th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT)10.1109/DCOSS-IoT58021.2023.00028(95-102)Online publication date: Jun-2023
  • (2022)Battery-Less Environment Sensor Using Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting from Soil-Ambient Air Temperature DifferencesSensors10.3390/s2213473722:13(4737)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Leveraging Micro Energy Sources in Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks2022 17th Wireless On-Demand Network Systems and Services Conference (WONS)10.23919/WONS54113.2022.9764545(1-8)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2022
  • (2022)Review of contemporary energy harvesting techniques and their feasibility in wireless geophonesInternational Journal of Energy Research10.1002/er.762646:5(5703-5730)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2022
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