Self-powered pumping switched TENG enabled real-time wireless metal tin height and position recognition and counting for production line management

Harvesting high entropy energy using triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) has attracted more and more attentions. For normal self-powered wireless sensing applications, a significant portion of harvested energy will be consumed by the subsequent power management and wireless communication units, leading to the incapability of real-time wireless sensing. In this paper, we proposed a pumping switched TENG (PSW-TENG) for real-time wireless sensing. An inductor magnetic sensor coil integrated with the TENG forms a LC resonant circuit, converts the pulsed output of TENG into resonant signal with the encoded sensing information,which is significantly boosted using an integrated microswitch and a charge pump, and then transmitted via a laser diode up to 2 m. The sensor system has been utilized to detect metallic components passing through. The self-powered metal component monitoring system has a height recognition sensitivity of 11.7 kHz/mm and a horizontal position recognition sensitivity of 5.6 kHz/mm with the largest error of 8.5 kHz, showing good sensitivity and stability. Based on the sensing system, the types and passing number of tins on a conveyor can be simultaneously identified and counted. All the results have demonstrated the great potential of the real-time self-powered wireless sensing system for production line management.