Modeling of Power Consumption and Fault Tolerance for Electronic Textiles

The developments in textile technology now enable the weaving of conductive wires into the fabrics. This allows the introduction of electronic components such as sensors, actuators and computational devices on the fabrics, creating electronic textiles (etextiles). E-textiles can be either wearable or non-wearable. However, regardless of their form, e-textiles are placed in a tightly constrained design space requiring high computational performance, limited power consumption, and fault tolerance. The purpose of this research is to create simulation models for power consumption and fault behavior of e-textile applications. For the power consumption model, the power profile of the computational elements must be tracked dynamically based upon the power states of the e-textile components. For the fault behavior model, the physical nature of the e-textile and the faults developed can adversely affect the accuracy of results from the e-textile. Open and short circuit faults can disconnect or drain the battery respectively, affecting both battery life and the performance of the e-textile. This thesis describes the development of both of these models and their interfaces. It then presents simulation results of the performance of an acoustic beamforming e-textile in the presence and absence of faults, using those results to explore the battery life and fault tolerance of several battery configurations.