ePave: A Self-Powered Wireless Sensor for Smart and Autonomous Pavement

Jian Xiao, Xiang Zou, Wenyao Xu
2017 Sensors  
Smart Pavement" is an emerging infrastructure for various on-road applications in transportation and road engineering. However, existing road monitoring solutions demand a certain periodic maintenance effort due to battery life limits in the sensor systems. To this end, we present an end-to-end self-powered wireless sensor-ePave-to facilitate smart and autonomous pavements. The ePave system includes a self-power module, an ultra-low-power sensor system, a wireless transmission module and a
more » ... -in power management module. First, we performed an empirical study to characterize the piezoelectric module in order to optimize energy-harvesting efficiency. Second, we developed an integrated sensor system with the optimized energy harvester. An adaptive power knob is designated to adjust the power consumption according to energy budgeting. Finally, we intensively evaluated the ePave system in real-world applications to examine the system's performance and explore the trade-off. to transport asphalt data for the diagnosis of road health status. Guo et al. [29] consider applying simultaneous wireless information and power transfer techniques to co-operative clustered wireless sensor networks, where energy-constrained relay nodes harvest the ambient RF signal and use the harvested energy to forward the packets from sources to destinations. However, the use of RF energy requires on-board RF readers to provide energy for power supply modules and the RF energy-receiving antenna is large in size and inconvenient to bury. Therefore, the use of road piezoelectric energy has become an efficient and convenient energy source. To this end, piezoelectric pavements should harvest enough energy to supply data acquisition and wireless transmission. Obviously, road data collection and other components should be embedded into the road and will be inaccessible for frequent maintenance. In fact, this sensor system can also access different sensors to apply to other information, e.g., road traffic flow [30] or wheel tracking [31] . Therefore, a wireless sensing application for pavement energy harvesting is proposed in this paper. This paper presents a pavement self-powered wireless sensing system that integrates a self-power module, an ultra-low-power sensor system, a wireless transmission module and a built-in power management module, ePave. The piezoelectric transducers are used to collect energy from the pressurized asphalt pavement and supply power to the sensor nodes. Because vehicle traffic is irregular, the collected energy is not uniform. Based on this feature, we run the system at intervals, depending on how much energy is collected, and the circuit that detects power is self-powered. Note that the energy collected by the vehicle over the road is very small (only a few mJ), so the internal friction of the circuit and the loss of the storage device should be very small and should be operated at low power consumption or even zero power. In summary, we make the following major contributions:
doi:10.3390/s17102207 pmid:28954430 pmcid:PMC5677397 fatcat:atnp73w3i5gtzjezijxvqb3bgq