Battery-Less Environment Sensor Using Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting from Soil-Ambient Air Temperature Differences

Energy harvesting is an effective technique for prolonging the lifetime of Internet of Things devices and Wireless Sensor Networks. In applications such as environmental sensing, which demands a deploy-and-forget architecture, energy harvesting is an unavoidable technology. Thermal energy is one of the most widely used sources for energy harvesting. A thermal energy harvester can convert a thermal gradient into electrical energy. Thus, the temperature difference between the soil and air could act as a vital source of energy for an environmental sensing device. In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept design of an environmental sensing node that harvests energy from soil temperature and uses the DASH7 communication protocol for connectivity. We evaluate the soil temperature and air temperature based on the data collected from two locations: one in Belgium and the other in Iceland. Using these datasets, we calculate the amount of energy that is producible from both of these sites. We further design power management and monitoring circuit and use a supercapacitor as the energy storage element, hence making it battery-less. Finally, we deploy the proof-of-concept prototype in the field and evaluate its performance. We demonstrate that the system can harvest, on average, 178.74 mJ and is enough to perform at least 5 DASH7 transmissions and 100 sensing tasks per day.