Energy Harvesting for Wireless Sensors

Energy harvesting (or energy scavenging) is concerned with converting ambient energy into electricity for small devices. This can overcome the biggest bottleneck of wireless sensor adoption today by replacing the battery with a harvester that can enable the sensor to work for decades. Energy harvesters that take power from movement, heat, light, organic matter etc already exist and now so do energy harvesting powered wireless sensors. This session covers some of the latest progress with energy harvesters to power wireless sensors. (Image Source: Trophos Energy, Inc)

Confirmed speakers include:

Professor Gang Chen, The Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering, Director of Pappalardo Micro and Nano Engineering Laboratories, MIT https://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/7/a/a/c/thumb_13171404.jpeg
Title: "Power from Temperature Difference: Thermoelectric Technology for Energy Harvesting"
Bio: Dr. Gang Chen is currently the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from UC Berkeley in 1993 working under then Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien. He was an assistant professor at Duke University from 1993-1997, and associate professor at University of California at Los Angeles from 1997-2001, and moved to MIT in 2001. He is a recipient of an NSF Young Investigator Award, a Guggenheim Fellow, an ASME Fellow, an ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award, a R&D100 Award, and the first holder of the Warren and Towneley Rohsenow Professorship at MIT. He has published extensively in the area of nanoscale energy transport and conversion and nanoscale heat transfer. He serves on the editorial boards for four journals in heat transfer and nanotechnology and chaired the advisory board of ASME Nanotechnology Institute. He is the director of Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center funded by the US DOE’s Energy Frontier Research Centers program. He co-founded GMZ Energy.

Sage Radachowsky, Trophos Energy
Title: "Energy Harvesting in The Dirt"
Bio: Sage Radachowsky is a self-taught electrical engineer who has developed one of the world's most efficient low-power, low-voltage input DC to DC converters, and is currently working on an adaptive converter with multiple forms of maximum power point tracking and the ability to bootstrap from a low-power, low-current source, such as environmental microbial fuel cells. He has an abiding interest in pushing the boundaries of low-power sensing and communications. Sage is currently lead electrical engineer at Trophos Energy, Inc.

Dr. Andreas Mershin, Scientific Advisor, Voltree Power https://photos4.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/7/a/9/c/thumb_13171388.jpeg

Title: "Harvesting Energy from Trees"
Bio: Dr. Andreas Mershin received his MSci in Physics from Imperial College London (1997) and his PhD in Physics from Texas A&M University (2003). A patent holder and entrepreneur in the field of biophotovoltaics and biosensors he is the Science Advisor to Voltree Power, a company developing a mesh-networked, battery-replacement-free forest wildfire alert and prediction. He has acted as science advisor to several MIT100K competitors and is the 2003 winner of the Texas A&M Center for New Ventures and Entrepreneurship Business Idea Competition. He consults numerous multinational electronics and renewable energy companies on cutting edge innovation in the fields of bioelectronics and bionanotechnology.
About: Voltree Power focuses on innovative solutions to large-scale monitoring problems that have been too expensive to solve using available technologies. From forest fire detection and prediction, to border control and agricultural monitoring, wherever detailed sensory data are needed, our low-power wireless mesh networks provide an answer that is cost-effective, easy to use and maintain, and environmentally responsible

Voltree Power’s patented bioenergy harvester converts living plant metabolic energy to useable electricity, providing a unique battery replacement alternative. When coupled with our software and low-power transceiver hardware, this technology makes practical the deployment of large-scale, long-term sensor networks in a variety of previously inaccessible environments, such as under triple-canopy or in hostile terrain.