Energy Harvesting Devices for Wireless Monitoring for Rotorcraft

By combining energy harvesting technologies with advances in wireless sensing, extending component lives through enhanced usage tracking is achievable, thereby reducing maintenance costs, enhancing mission readiness, and increasing safety. This session details challenges associated with available harvesters, and offers a solution to more effectively power WSNs from disparate vibration environments.
● The benefits and difficulties associated with wireless sensor nodes for condition based maintenance (CBM) and prognostics and health monitoring (PHM).
● The current challenges associated with harvesters, including the difficulty of effective energy harvesting in disparate vibration environments with a single application.
● An overview of the varying vibration spectrums in a rotorcraft application, and of the design process for finding a solution to harvest the energy source.
● The viability of the new design through proven bandwidth testing & tuning and environmental testing.
● How to effectively scavenge and convert energy to power typical wireless sensor applications in very different, but common, vibration environments.