SBIR-STTR Award

Sensors powered from environmental energy sources and capable of communication over wireless links will be a tremendous boon to manufacturing systems monitoring and condition based maintenance programs. It is usually inconvenient and often cost-prohibitive or physically impossible to run signal and power cables to sensors used to monitor complex machines and industrial systems. The ability to extract energy from the machine environment to power intelligent sensors employing wireless data communication clearly would be a very desirable development. Solid-state thermoelectric heat pumps are readily available commercially; however these units typically are optimized for refrigeration applications and operate at low voltage and high power levels. Recent advances in thermoelectric (TE) module fabrication technology has led to the development of miniature TE modules that may operate at modest temperature gradients (10¿ - 20¿ C) to generate voltage and current levels suitable for powering semiconductor electronic circuits. There also is rapid progress in the development of compact wireless intelligent sensors that employ the Bluetooth¿ RF communication specification and are compliant with the IEEE P1451 family of smart transducer network standards. The goal of the proposed program is to integrate these emerging technologies to create autonomous "plug and play" sensors for use in manufacturing environm