Power Harvesting for Encrypted Wireless Sensor Clusters

Among the Navy’s goals for new ship construction are to achieve cost savings in ship installation, to increase survivability of the vital communications infrastructure, and to enable manning reductions through highly automated ship operations. The rapid advancements and proliferation of wireless technology makes it a primary candidate for adaptation to machinery health monitoring, condition based maintenance (CBM), and machinery control in support of these objectives. The particular challenges that must be addressed to enable integrated wireless sensing to meet these objectives are communications through and around steel ship compartments, secure wireless communications, and most importantly minimizing power requirements enabling the application of emerging parasitic or energy scavenging power technologies. The Navy’s Phase I STTR topic N06-T020, “Power Harvesting for Encrypted Wireless Sensor Clusters” presents the opportunity to address these challenges through the development of energy scavenging electronics adapted to shipboard environments and innovative low power wireless sensing elements.BENEFITS: The results of this STTR are applicable to wide variety of sensor monitoring systems. By developing a wireless energy scavenging sensor node, the solution presented in Phase I will enable tunneling a wireless network through walls where wire based communication and power distribution simply isn’t a viable option. In the Phase I, 3 Phoenix, Inc (3Pi) teamed with North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NCA&T), and Ferro Solutions, Inc (FSi) will develop a robust self powered energy harvesting scalable wireless architecture that will significantly reduce the network installation cost, provide a highly survivable control system, and enable technology insertion of the new system onto existing platforms. The team will focus not only on the energy harvesting and storage but will also address the problem at the source and investigate ultra low power electronics solutions and approaches for efficient energy management.