Energy Harvesting Design for Autonomous Wireless Sensors Network Applied to Trains

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) technology is considered an excellent compromise for supporting monitoring applications on old trains operated by railway systems around the world. Although WSNs are optimized for energy management with regards to sensor nodes and communication protocols, their lifetimes remain limited by battery capacity. Deployment of new sensors or replacement of empty batteries is often required to extend the life of the WSN. These solutions are often expensive and challenging, particularly when the sensors are in unreachable places. Energy harvesting is a promising approach that addresses these issues: it powers WSNs by scavenging energy from the ambient train environment. This paper proposes a system that gathers energy generated by the train's vibration. The objective of this work is designing a harvester according to real measured vibration sources from a train and the energy requirement of a temperature/humidity sensor. Then we propose in this paper a guideline for configuring an autonomous wireless sensor node powered by a piezoelectric vibration energy harvester.