Energy Harvesting Based Wireless Sensor Nodes for The Monitoring Temperature of Gearbox

Temperatures are effective indicators of the health of many ma-chines such as the wind turbine gearboxes, bearings, engines, etc. This paper pre-sents a novel wireless temperature sensor node powered by a thermal harvester for monitoring the status of gearboxes. A thermoelectric generator module (TEG) is optimized to harvest the electrical power from a heat source such as the gear-box undergoing such monitoring. The power generation from this method is ob-tained based on temperature gradients emanated by sandwiching the TEG be-tween the two aluminum plates. One plate is exposed to the heat source and has the role of a heat collector, whereas the other plate, mounted with a low profile heat-sink, acts as a heat spreader. The harvested power is then used to power a wireless temperature node for condition monitoring, resulting in a powerless and wireless monitoring system.
To evaluate the system, an industrial gearbox is monitored by the designed temperature node. The node is fabricated using a TEG module; an LTC3108 DC-DC converter for boosting the voltage, a super-capacitor for energy storage and a CC2650 sensor tag for measuring the temperature of the gearbox. The temper-ature data is transferred via the Bluetooth Low Energy and then monitored using portable monitoring devices, such as a mobile phones. The results obtained show the system can provide a continuous monitoring of the temperature information.