Power management systems that harvest ambient energy will power billions of small devices on the Internet of Things.
October 5, 2022
Power management systems that harvest ambient energy will power billions of small devices on the Internet of Things.
Tiny internet-connected electronic devices are becoming ubiquitous. The so-called Internet of Things (IoT) allows smart gadgets in the home and wearable technologies like smart watches to communicate and operate together. IoT devices are increasingly used across all sorts of industries to drive interconnectivity and smart automation as part of the ‘fourth industrial revolution.”
The fourth industrial revolution builds on already widespread digital technology such as connected devices, artificial intelligence, robotics and 3D printing. It is expected to be a significant factor in revolutionizing society, the economy and culture.
These small, autonomous, interconnected and often wireless devices are already playing a key role in our everyday lives by helping to make us more resource and energy-efficient, organized, safe, secure and healthy.
There is a key challenge, however—how to power these tiny devices. The obvious answer is “batteries.” But it is not quite that simple.
Small devices
Many of these devices are too small to use a long-life battery and they are located in remote or hard-to-access locations—for instance in the middle of the ocean tracking a shipping container or at the top of a grain silo, monitoring levels of cereal. These types of locations make servicing some IoT devices extremely challenging and commercially and logistically infeasible.
Mike Hayes, head of ICT for energy efficiency at the Tyndall National Institute in Ireland, summarizes the marketplace. “It’s projected that we are going to have one trillion sensors in the world by 2025,” he said, “That is one thousand billion sensors.”
That number is not as crazy as it first seems, according to Hayes, who is the coordinator of the EnABLES project (European Infrastructure Powering the Internet of Things).
If you think about the sensors in the technology someone might carry on their person or have in their car, home, office plus the sensors embedded in the infrastructure around them such as roads and railways, you can see where that number comes from, he explained.
“In the trillion IoT sensor world predicted for 2025, we are going to be throwing over 100 million batteries everyday into landfills unless we significantly extend battery life,” Hayes said.
