An Experimental Evaluation of a Thermal Energy Harvesting System for IoNT

The Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized connectivity by integrating everyday objects into the digital realm, facilitating autonomous data generation and transmission. However, extending IoT applications to natural environments, as envisioned in the Internet of Natural Things (IoNT) concept, poses unique challenges. To address these challenges, Energy Harvesting (EH) techniques have emerged as promising solutions, leveraging environmental energy sources such as thermal gradients. A novel concept, termed the “Smart Tree” is proposed to harvest thermal energy from trees to power IoT devices. Focused on forest fire detection, this work proposes an experimental setup for a complete Smart Tree Thermal Energy Harvesting System. This system incorporates TEGs, power regulation circuits, and data transmission capabilities via the Sigfox network. Furthermore, sensors are deployed to detect temperature anomalies indicative of potential fire sources. In this work, a procedure and a measuring platform to evaluate the suitability of TEG-regulated voltage for enabling data transmission from a node positioned on a tree is proposed, and experimental results are presented proving that the proposed system can send temperature data to the network.