Energy Harvesting Module

One of the several elephants in the wireless sensor network room is the apparent need to have thousands of batteries onsite in a fully developed network, and the need to have to go change out those batteries after some years (some say three years, some say five years, some say ten years) of service. If you have 3000 wireless transmitters in your refinery or plant, are you ready to replace all those batteries on any reasonable time base? How about if you have 300? How about 30? So there has been a search for battery substitutes, and here's one of the latest answers...  Product Brief: Joule-Thief™ Energy Harvesting ModuleThe Joule-Thief™ Energy Harvesting Module from AdaptivEnergy LLC  (Hampton, VA) is a compact, fully self-contained vibration energy harvester.  The module contains an energy harvesting beam based on AdaptivEnergy's proprietary Ruggedized Laminated Piezo (RLP) technology, as well as proprietary energy collection and storage circuitry.  The Joule-Thief™ module is the highest output vibration energy harvesting device per unit weight and volume of any commercially available energy harvester.   The module is designed to provide users with a standard 3.6 VDC output.  Several energy storage options are available including capacitors as well as several battery technologies.  The various energy storage options available allow the storage capacity to be matched to the user's application.  The standard modules store from 1.4 – 430 mJ depending on the storage device utilized.    The Joule-Thief™ module is capable of harvesting usable energy at vibration amplitudes that are below the threshold of human perception to power electronics devices such as wireless sensors.  The modules are designed to harvest energy from typical AC-powered devices thus they are available in standard frequencies of 60 and 120 Hz with custom frequencies available upon request.A Wireless Sensor Demonstration Kit is available as well that mates the Joule-Thief™ module to a sensor board which includes a Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontroller and a Texas Instruments CC2500 wireless transceiver.  The sensor board includes a temperature, pressure, and light sensor as well as a switch and potentiometer to allow experimentation with vibration powered wireless sensing, switching and proportional control.  All of the sensors, the microcontroller, and the transceiver are completely powered by the Joule-Thief™ module.  The sensor data is then transmitted to any PC.  Demonstration kits are available from AdaptivEnergy.