DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF VIBRATION BASED ENERGY HARVESTER SYSTEM ON MOVING MOTORCYCLE: WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK

With the development of the miniaturization techniques, the power consumption of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is falling rapidly to the level where it can be fulfilled by harvesting energy from its own environment. Being abundant and versatile, Vibration energy is identified to be the most suitable renewable power source for WSN. Vibration energy can be found in many target environment of WSN and at most of the time. For example, vibration can be found in a building, on a bridge, on industrial machine and many more places. Furthermore, in many cases availability of vibration energy is not specific to a certain period of day. This otherwise wasted energy can go to productive use if harnessed and stored. Vibration based energy harvesters can convert this wasted energy into electrical energy for self-powering wireless nodes that can be used for environmental monitoring, structural monitoring, surveillance as well as medical remote sensing. In recent years, mounting interest in alternative energy has accelerated the pace of research. Harvesting vibrations energy is one of the great interests because it has a potential power supply to recharge or avoid battery replacement for wireless sensors. In this project, vibration on a moving motorcycle is chosen as the energy source to be transformed into electrical power to self-power wireless sensors. The primary goal of this project is to design, fabricate, develop and characterize an energy harvester to harvest energy from a moving motorcycle. To achieve this goal vibration data has been collected from a moving motorcycle using an accelerometer. The recorded data is analyzed in order to determine the dominant and consistent frequency of vibration and the acceleration range in which the vibration occur.