A Soil-Based Energy Harvester for Wireless Sensor Nodes to Monitor Corrosion Characteristics of Underground Water Pipes

摘要

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have evolved much since they were first introduced. Among the most important applications, WSNs are now used for monitoring large scale strategic assets, such as water supply systems, power grids, and gas pipelines, to name a few. In this paper, we propose a WSN prototype for monitoring the corrosion characteristics of underground water pipes protected via the well-known SACP (Sacrificial Anode for Cathodic Protection) technique. This technique requires monitoring the depletion rate of the anode for replacement purposes. The current state of practice requires a human reader to visit each sacrificial anode (SA) site periodically to take voltage and current measurements, which is expensive and error-prone. In the proposed solution, the WSN periodically captures the required measurements and sends them to a base station. However, powering such underground WSNs poses multiple challenges. In the proposed prototype, an energy harvesting module is employed to harvest energy from the corrosion process in the SACP setup. Multiple experiments have been conducted to assess the rate of energy harvesting and evaluate the energy requirements of each sensor node during different operating modes. The preliminary results show the practicality of the proposed solution.