Feature: Energy and sustainability
rail industry, which aimed at monitoring the integrity of signalling lines. Because network operators impose strict safety regulations regarding maintenance, routine manual battery replacement was out of the question, and tapping into existing rail infrastructure risked signal interference. T e solution was a hybrid harvesting topology that combined
three separate ambient inputs: outdoor solar, micro-wind turbines and trackside piezoelectric transducers engineered to capture the intense mechanical impulses of passing trains. T e harvested energy was managed with an Analog
Devices ADP5091 PMIC. T is integrated circuit features ultra-low-power buck-boost DC-DC conversion and an integrated Maximum Power Point Tracking algorithm, which dynamically alters the input impedance to extract maximum effi ciency from changing environmental states. T e stored energy was buff ered into a supercapacitor array rated to withstand industrial high-temperature fl uctuations, providing the necessary transient current to power intermittent LoRa data transmissions even during long periods without train activity or daylight. Designing these systems requires a heavy dose of realism
about the transducer effi ciency. For instance, thermoelectric generators using the Seebeck eff ect on hot process piping are incredibly rugged but operate at a dismal 5-10% thermal-to- electrical effi ciency. Indoor photovoltaic cells are improving rapidly; the commercial availability of perovskite indoor PV materials has pushed indoor conversion effi ciencies up to 38% under typical warehouse fl uorescent lighting, but you are still dealing with fractions of a milliwatt per square centimetre.
Also required is storage management Furthermore, relying on energy harvesting does not eliminate the need for careful energy storage management. Storage elements (batteries or super-capacitors) must be overrated to compensate for capacity fade and equivalent series resistance degradation over a projected 10-year operating life. Engineers must also design fi rmware to support irregular
power delivery. T is means implementing event-based sensing, asynchronous wake-up patterns and processing data locally before transmission, wherever practical. Reducing the amount of data that must be transmitted can signifi cantly lower overall energy consumption, since wireless communication is oſt en one of the most power- hungry operations in an IIoT sensor node. Adopting an ambient harvesting design introduces an
undeniable 15-30% premium on upfront bill of materials, and the power management engineering is more complex than dropping a lithium thionyl chloride battery pack into an enclosure. However, when calculating the total cost of ownership across thousands of distributed nodes, eliminating the logistical nightmare of fi eld maintenance makes that upfront complexity and costs entirely worth the eff ort.
Figure 2: Power consumption comparison between conventional and energy-harvesting IIoT
Figure 3: Resilient energy-harvesting system in industrial settings
Figure 4: Energy harvesting transmission
www.electronicsworld.co.uk October 2026 41
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