AN ENERGY-EFFICIENT TEMPERATURE SENSING SYSTEM

Abstract

Temperature sensors play critical roles for accurate acquisition of temperature information in many applications, these include cold supply chains, healthcare, automotive and monitoring of perishable goods. With the rise of Internet of Things (IoT), temperature sensors are increasingly integrated in numerous and widely distributed sensors nodes. It is imperative to have sustainable and maintenance-free capabilities to enable long-term monitoring. One of the greatest challenges is the heavy reliance on batteries – an unsustainable and polluting source of power that requires replacement or recharging. Hence, it is vital for energy harvesting to supersede this depletable counterpart in sensing systems. This thesis reviews state-of-the-art energy harvesting technologies and designs for low-power temperature sensors and presents two fully energy autonomous temperature sensing systems: the first is solely powered by a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) designed for biomedical applications and the second is sustained by hybrid pyroelectric-piezoelectric energy harvesters for wider sensing applications.