Autonomous Temperature Sensor for Smart Agriculture

Autonomous Temperature Sensor for Smart Agriculture: Energy Harvesting and Control

van der Sande, Robin (TU Delft Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Hubers, Martijn (TU Delft Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

van Puffelen, Ron (mentor)
Fan, Qinwen (mentor)
Pakula, Lukasz (mentor)
Bauer, Pavol (graduation committee)
Ghaffarian Niasar, Mohamad (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Electrical Engineering

The Autonomous Temperature Sensor for Smart Agriculture project

2020-06-30

Many countries in the world face the problem of fruit frost during spring, which results in the loss of harvested crops. Solutions exist to prevent the fruit to freeze, however this requires that the temperature is known. Therefore, a smart autonomous temperature sensor network is designed that is capable of acquiring a 3D temperature profile of a fruit orchard to detect fruit frost. This thesis discusses the design of the energy harvesting and control module, which is one of the three sub-modules of the system. The goal is to sustain the energy demands of the sensor in a durable way, in order to operate for 20 years without requiring maintenance. To achieve this, several ambient energy sources and their harvesting techniques are investigated and simulated to examine the energy that can be harvested. This resulted in the use of solar energy, harvested by a solar cell and controlled by a maximum power point tracking module. Next, different energy storage implementations are considered to store the harvested energy temporarily. The use of a 5 F supercapacitor is concluded. Furthermore, an energy monitoring circuit is designed to measure the energy stored in the supercapacitor. Full system reliability simulations are done to verify the complete design by utilising the solar irradiance and temperature data of the past ten years. From these simulations is concluded that the design can sustain the energy demands of the sensor at all times.

Energy harvesting
Sustainable Energy
MPPT
MPPT module
Solar cell
Solar
Supercapacitor
Supercapacitor storage
Energy monitoring
SPV1050
Energy control
Smart agriculture
Sensor nodes
Wireless sensor nodes
Sustainable harvesting
RF energy harvesting
SPV1050 implementation
Ambient energy sources
Ambient energy

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:f867bbf1-cfa6-465f-85f8-36a4d34752d3

51.9962559, 4.3758659

Student theses

bachelor thesis

© 2020 Robin van der Sande, Martijn Hubers