Home Chimney Pinwheels (HCP) as Steh and Remote Monitoring for Smart Building IoT and WSN Applications

Abstract

Smart, and ultra-low energy consuming Internet of Things (IoTs), wireless sensor networks (WSN), and autonomous devices are being deployed to smart buildings and cities, which require continuous power supply, whereas battery usage has accompanying environmental problems, coupled with additional maintenance cost. We present Home Chimney Pinwheels (HCP) as the Smart Turbine Energy Harvester (STEH) for wind; and Cloud-based remote monitoring of its output data. The HCP commonly serves as an external cap to home chimney exhaust outlets; they have very low inertia to wind; and are available on the rooftops of some buildings. Here, an electromagnetic converter adapted from a brushless DC motor was mechanically fastened to the circular base of an 18-blade HCP. In simulated wind, and rooftop experiments, an output voltage of 0.3 V to 16 V was realised for a wind speed between 0.6 to 16 km/h. This is sufficient to operate low-power IoT devices deployed around a smart city. The harvester was connected to a power management unit and its output data was remotely monitored via the IoT analytic Cloud platform “ThingSpeak” by means of LoRa transceivers, serving as sensors; while also obtaining supply from the harvester. The HCP can be a battery-less “stand-alone” low-cost STEH, with no grid connection, and can be installed as attachments to IoT or wireless sensors nodes in smart buildings and cities.