Contactless power and data transmission for underwater sensor nodes

Abstract

When the technology of wireless sensor network is applied to ocean monitoring, the ocean underwater monitoring system will become a distributed network system. That could improve the level of ocean monitoring significantly. But most of the current ocean monitoring equipments work independently, and it is difficult to form them into a sensor network. To set up a sensor network, electric energy supply and data transmission are the chief problem, especially for the underwater sensor nodes. To solve this problem, a new method for contactless power and data transmission is proposed. It operates with the principle of electromagnetic coupling. Power and data are transmitted through a mutual channel. This channel is realized by the structure of a two-stage electromagnetic coupler. Here, steel rope is used as the closed steel ring to compose an electromagnetic coupler. Since steel rope is widely used in the current underwater equipments, the transmission channel of power and data can be realized without changing the existing structure. Furthermore, because of contactless transmission the sensor network has good expansibility and convenient configuration of its nodes for underwater applications. A voltage transformation model for the two-stage electromagnetic coupler is constructed and the transmitting principle of power and data is analyzed based on the model. According to the energy transmission efficiency and the bit error rate, an experimental prototype is designed and fabricated. Finally, the prototype testing of power transmission, data transmission, and reactive power compensation are carried out. The experimental results show that the proposed method for contactless power and data transmission is feasible and it is suitable for the application of underwater sensor nodes. © 2013 Huang et al.