Week Four

So my project is to be involved with the Hydraulic Pressure Energy Harvester (HPEH) device, primarily working on a wireless sensor node and creating pressure sensors in order to prove that the HPEH device functions properly.  The HPEH device itself is a device that essentially takes the sound energy produced by hydraulic systems and convert it into usable power in order to operate small sensors (eg: pressure sensors, thermistors, position sensors) to help aid in monitoring of system health.  Basically, the device takes the fluctuations in the pressure ripple and converts it into usable power via piezoelectric stacks.

What I'm working on, presently, is doing some testing of the most recent generation of the HPEH device that utilizes multiple piezoelectric stacks (deadweight and dynamic) along with doing some basic testing of the piezoelectric stacks in parallel and in series in order to get the piezoelectric strain constant characteristics.  Along with trying to design dynamic and static pressure sensors utilizing the piezo stacks either as the sensor itself (dynamic sensing, essentially trying to integrate the two stacks into a circuit) or using the HPEH device to power it (static sensing).  Of course there is also the wireless sensor node work, though that is taking more time given that my skills with coding aren't as great as I would ideally like them to be for tackling something as code intensive as a wireless sensor node.

The impact of this work is that, if it functions in the way that is desired, will allow for easy powering of system health monitoring devices rather than having to use batteries, they can be powered by the machine itself as it makes use of the sound energy being created by the hydraulic equipment.

Why this research is interesting is probably more specific to me as acoustics and thermofluids are two large interests of mine that I was interested in combining.  Which, this research does in a really interesting way outside of just trying to mitigate the noise being created, it is utilizing the noise energy to convert it into a usable source of power.

- Tanya