Self Powered Wireless Sensors for Chassis, Powertrain, Working Equipment and Trailed Implements

Performance request, needs for fleet management, vehicle safety and diagnosis control strategies, ask for a continuous increase in vehicle functionalities and work variables observability and controllability. Self-powered wireless sensors, capable of collecting the power they consume directly from the vibrations available on the spot, could play a key role in enabling the sensorization of all those parts of heavy duty machines and trailed vehicles which cannot be connected through wires. This paper investigates the applicability of self-powered wireless sensor nodes to heavy duty machinery by analyzing the energy budget which can be reached by these devices in such operating environment. A survey of possible sensor design is presented, to examine the energy requirements for signal transduction and wireless data transmission, and to highlight most relevant design issues affecting power consumption. Two representative case studies are then considered, to estimate with the support of original experimental data the amount of energy that can be generated by placing state-of-the-art off-the-shelf energy transducers on the gearbox of a baler and on the rear chassis of a tractor. By comparing the amounts of generated and required energy, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of self-powered wireless sensors in the context of heavy duty machines.