Power Harvesting for Shipboard Health Monitoring Sensors

"This Phase I Navy SBIR proposal is aimed at the development of a new class of wireless sensing devices. These sensors do not require batteries or external magnetic fields in order to send data, instead, they rely on harvesting vibration energy in order tosense information and to wirelessly transmit that information to a central host.MicroStain, Inc. currently produces a range of wireless sensing instruments, including microprocessor based, multichannel, programmable transmitters that are compatible with a wide range of sensors, including thermocouples, strain gauges, accelerometers,displacement sensors, and capacitive sensors. Furthermore, we have designed and demonstrated prototype energy harvesting systems that employ piezoelectric materials. These wireless sensing systems use digital RF communications, node addressing, and timedivision multiple access to allow networks of sensing nodes to communicate to a central (web-enabled) receiver.The Phase I effort will include: improvements in the piezoelectric energy harvesting circuit, optimization of the proposed sensing systems for various applications to minimize power consumption, and, development of mathematical models to facilitatepiezoelectric energy harvesting from a straining structural element and from a vibratory environment. This will result in improved energy harvesting systems, including the modeling required for application to shipboard health monitoring. These systems