The aims of this research are to investigate and develop novel energy harvesters to enable autonomous environmental sensing nodes to be self powered.
The novel physical science and engineering methodology used will involve detailed investigation of one or two novel harvesting technologies, such as change of ambient pressure, or varying temperature gradients throughout the day, and the design of suitable energy storage techniques, which may or may not be direct to electricity eg mechanical storage of energy in springs, for generation on demand.
The practicality of this will be demonstrated using a typical IoT low power node, designed to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of such a system. The application in the future will be to enable the environmental Internet of Things by allowing fully autonomous self-powered sensor system to be distributed, which will be a key requirement for application areas such as smart agriculture.