Abstract
Current Internet of Things (IoT) devices are not designed to be sustainable. For example, large batteries are often equipped to guarantee that sensing and transmitting tasks can be performed at fixed intervals for years on end. This significantly affects the form factor, cost, and ecological footprint of IoT devices. In this project, we will design and develop sustainable systems that are able to harvest various renewable energy sources , including but not limited to solar, thermal and kinetic energy. The system will consist of (1) a power management module that includes energy harvesting hardware and energy storage units (i.e. batteries or supercapacitors), (2) sensors for environmental monitoring, (3) a low-power microcontroller unit (MCU) and (4) a low power communication module. Additionally, we will implement intelligent algorithms on this system to make it energy-aware. This will allow the system to adapt its behaviour based on its current and future available energy, effectively improving its reliability and energy efficiency.
The sustainable system has a broad application potential, ranging from solar-powered air quality measurement units in Belgium to low-power thermal energy harvesting devices for climate research in Iceland. In this project, we will evaluate our sustainable system with the latter use case.
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