research-article

Harvest Energy from the Water: A Self-Sustained Wireless Water Quality Sensing System

Authors:

Quanlong LiAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS), Volume 17, Issue 1

Article No.: 3, Pages 1 - 24

https://doi.org/10.1145/3047646

Published: 20 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Water quality data is incredibly important and valuable, but its acquisition is not always trivial. A promising solution is to distribute a wireless sensor network in water to measure and collect the data; however, a drawback exists in that the batteries of the system must be replaced or recharged after being exhausted. To mitigate this issue, we designed a self-sustained water quality sensing system that is powered by renewable bioenergy generated from microbial fuel cells (MFCs). MFCs collect the energy released from native magnesium oxidizing microorganisms (MOMs) that are abundant in natural waters. The proposed energy-harvesting technology is environmentally friendly and can provide maintenance-free power to sensors for several years. Despite these benefits, an MFC can only provide microwatt-level power that is not sufficient to continuously power a sensor. To address this issue, we designed a power management module to accumulate energy when the input voltage is as low as 0.33V. We also proposed a radio-frequency (RF) activation technique to remotely activate sensors that otherwise are switched off in default. With this innovative technique, a sensor’s energy consumption in sleep mode can be completely avoided. Additionally, this design can enable on-demand data acquisitions from sensors. We implement the proposed system and evaluate its performance in a stream. In 3-month field experiments, we find the system is able to reliably collect water quality data and is robust to environment changes.

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Harvest Energy from the Water: A Self-Sustained Wireless Water Quality Sensing System

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems

ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems Volume 17, Issue 1

Special Issue on Autonomous Battery-Free Sensing and Communication, Special Issue on ESWEEK 2016 and Regular Papers

January 2018

630 pages

ISSN:1539-9087

EISSN:1558-3465

DOI:10.1145/3136518

Editor:
Sandeep K. Shukla
Indian Institute of Technology, India

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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ACM Journals for the Design of Smart and Connected Systems

Publication History

Published: 20 September 2017

Accepted: 01 January 2017

Received: 01 July 2016

Published in TECS Volume 17, Issue 1

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Cited By

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https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2020.3003910
Oruma SMisra SFernandez-Sanz L(2021)Agriculture 4.0: An Implementation Framework for Food Security Attainment in Nigeria’s Post-Covid-19 EraIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2021.30864539(83592-83627)Online publication date: 2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3086453
Kansal NBhushan BSharma S(2021)Architecture, Security Vulnerabilities, and the Proposed Countermeasures in Agriculture-Internet-of-Things (AIoT) SystemsInternet of Things and Analytics for Agriculture, Volume 310.1007/978-981-16-6210-2_16(329-353)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6210-2_16
Liu YVoigt TWirstrom NHoglund J(2019)EcoVibe: On-Demand Sensing for Railway Bridge Structural Health MonitoringIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2018.28670866:1(1068-1078)Online publication date: Feb-2019
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Huo YXu MFan XJing T(2018)A novel secure relay selection strategy for energy-harvesting-enabled Internet of thingsEURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking10.1186/s13638-018-1281-42018:1Online publication date: 16-Nov-2018
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13638-018-1281-4
Cong HLi QZhou CYang Q(2018)Analysis on Connectivity of Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Simulation2018 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC)10.1109/ICCNC.2018.8390272(762-768)Online publication date: Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCNC.2018.8390272

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