Hands-on: autonomous devices

Content of the lecture:
The scope of the lesson is to discuss the distributed Iot sensors powering issues and to learn how to solve them through energy harvesting. Starting from what IoT is and from common IoT technologies, the main powering problems are analysed, in order to highlight the principal features to take into account during the design of a self-powered IoT device. Then, different methods for energy harvesting are described, and the best applications for each one are presented. In particular, non-linear energy harvesting is deepened  in comparison to linear energy harvesting: pros and cons are highlighted for each one in different fields of applications. In particular, some Wisepower’s devices are shown, from their first design down to their final optimised one, in order to practically show the different steps of design and development. Finally, UmbraGroup SpA will show some industrial applications developed in collaboration with Wisepower and will go through the most important desiderata from the machine monitoring sector.
Teacher: Prof. Elisabetta Boco

Elisabetta Boco is a Physicist: during her master degree in University of Perugia, she studied Stochastic Resonance for Energy Harvesting Applications, under the supervision of Professor Luca Gammaitoni. In 2017 she was awarded with a PhD in mechanical engineering in University of Limerick, Ireland, under the academic supervision of Prof. Jeff Punch: she specialised in experimental and theoretical optimisation of multi-degree-of-freedom non-linear energy harvesters. During her PhD scholarships, she also worked on designing, realising and optimising a harvester prototype under the industrial supervision of Dr. Ronan Frizzell in Nokia Bell Labs, Dublin, where she worked as intern for 6 months. After the PhD degree, she worked as a post-doc researcher for two years in the University of Perugia, under the collaboration with Wisepower Srl, where she entered as R&D staff in 2019. Her principal field of expertise is the realisation of non-linear harvesters prototypes to power small portable electronic devices. She is now mainly working in powering structural health monitoring and tracking devices, through tailored harvesting solutions. Moreover, she collaborates in designing, coding and testing the devices’ firmware and the online software for monitoring.

 

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