Energy Harvesting Based Wireless Sensor Nodes Foe the Monitoring Temperature of Gearbox

Temperatures are effective indicators of the health of many machines such as the wind turbine gearboxes, bearings, engines, etc. This paper presents a novel wireless temperature sensor node powered by a thermal harvester for monitoring the status of gearboxes. A thermoelectric generator module (TEG) is optimized to harvest the electrical power from a heat source such as the gearbox undergoing such monitoring. The power generation from this method is obtained based on temperature gradients emanated by sandwiching the TEG between the two aluminum plates. One plate is exposed to the heat source and has the role of a heat collector, whereas the other plate, mounted with a low profile heat-sink, acts as a heat spreader. The harvested power is then used to power a wireless temperature node for condition monitoring, resulting in a powerless and wireless monitoring system. To evaluate the system, an industrial gearbox is monitored by the designed temperature node. The node is fabricated using a TEG module; an LTC3108 DCDC converter for boosting the voltage, a super-capacitor for energy storage and a CC2650 sensor tag for measuring the temperature of the gearbox. The temperature data is transferred via the Bluetooth Low Energy and then monitored using portable monitoring devices, such as a mobile phones. The results obtained show the system can provide a continuous monitoring of the temperature information.