Self-Powered Wireless Wind Speed Sensor Based on an Electret Generator

Self-powered wireless sensors have gained increasing attention in recent years. However, due to the significant energy consumption of commercial sensing and wireless modules and the limited energy harvested from the environment, it remains challenging to simultaneously achieve long-range and real-time wireless sensing. To address this issue, a fully self-powered wireless wind speed sensor with the ability of long transmission range and real-time sensing capability is proposed in this work. The design is achieved by integrating a micro rotary electret generator with a custom designed surface acoustic wave resonator based ultra-low power transmitter, which enables digital sensing and transmission of wind speed over 100 m in real-time without any start-up time. This work opens a new pathway towards self-powered and long-range wireless sensing nodes.