Feasibility of air quality monitoring systems based on environmental energy harvesting

Capillary wireless sensor networks dedicated to air quality monitoring have provided essential information on hazardous air condition, generating early warnings to prevent danger situation for human health. The arising problem connected to capillary networks is the adoption of environmental energy as primary and/or unique energy source instead of the replacement of hundreds or even thousands of batteries on a regular basis that leads to high costs and practical problems of devices management. Aim of this paper is to presents a multiparametric sensor node for air quality monitoring, able to work without battery and human intervention, harvesting energy from the surrounding environment for perpetual operation. A complete autonomy system has been designed, experimental results of the harvest energy section and the budget allocation of the power consumption of the system are presented. Moreover the paper shows the experimental results of the studies conducted on the sensors section. A tailored calibration process for the sensors and the energy recovery section could effectively lead the system to trace the air quality levels in indoor and outdoor application, in a sort of “set and forget” scenario. approach could effectively report and trace air quality levels.