Energy Harvesting Techniques for Powering Wireless Sensor Networks in Aircraft Applications: A Review

Abstract

In the recent years, wireless sensors (WS) have utilized for various structural applications such as structural health monitoring and flight tests. The conventional battery system to power these sensors is inefficient due to several limitations including heavyweight, large size, less power output, short cycle life, and requirement of their replacements. Therefore energy harvesting systems are gaining much research attention to build the self-powered WS. The energy harvesting unit can directly extract the energy from the local environment such as pressure, vibration, wind, thermal gradients and the solar source. The reported energy harvesting methods are piezoelectric, triboelectric, thermoelectric, electromagnetic, and magnetostrictive. This review focuses on the different energy harvesting techniques and challenges of their integration with the WS for the aircraft applications.