Place- amp;-Play industrial router addressing potential explosive atmospheres

Authors

Abstract

In general, deployments of Wireless Sensors Networks in industrial rigs face several constrains, especially those concerning power supply of scattered devices: cabling is expensive and takes a long time, and, on the hand, batteries are sensitive to both current peaks and high temperatures, thus requiring periodic replacement. This work presents a low power router which, by gathering energy from a tiny solar panel and storing it in a supercapacitor, addresses the stringent regulations that have to be met to work in potentially explosive atmospheres and, still, keep working continuously so as to serve communication requirements of wireless networks in such harsh environments: evaluation of the energy balance under different harvesting and consumption conditions was carried out, whose results ensure the feasibility of this technology.

Keywords

energy harvesting;energy storage;hazardous areas;low-power electronics;manufacturing industries;power consumption;solar cell arrays;supercapacitors;telecommunication network routing;wireless sensor networks;cabling;communication requirements;consumption conditions;energy balance;energy harvesting;energy storage;explosive atmospheres;harsh environments;industrial rigs;low power router;place-&-play industrial router;power supply;scattered devices;solar panel;supercapacitor;wireless sensors networks;Batteries;Explosives;Radio frequency;Supercapacitors;System-on-chip;Wireless communication;Wireless sensor networks;energy harvesting;energy storage;potential explosive atmospheres;wireless sensor networks

Conference

IECON 2014 - 40th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society 2014

DOI