Benefits of Energy Harvesting for Reliable Wireless Networks in the Process Industry (Energy Harvesting and Storage Europe 2014)

In wireless field instruments, a power supply using energy harvesting provides a number of advantages over solutions depending on batteries only. While the reduced effort for battery replacements is obvious, increased update rate and more reliable repeater functionality can be even more significant in meshed networks. This talk adresses known issues in creating reliable large wireless networks and shows how energy harvesting can help solving some of them.

Dr. Kai König is employed as a scientist at the ABB Corporate Research Center in Ladenburg, Germany. His current research topics include industrial sensors, energy harvesting, and autonomous process devices. He studied physics, microelectronics and biology in Heidelberg, and received his PhD in 2011 from the German Cancer Research Center and the University of Heidelberg for his work on microparticle-based peptide array synthesis on CMOS chips.

Ulf Ahrend studied Physics at the Technical University Braunschweig and at Virginia Tech (USA). During his Ph.D. studies he worked on turbulent heat transfer at MIT and Technical University Braunschweig.

 

Currently, he is Principal Scientist at ABB's Corporate Research Center Germany. His main focus is on sensor-based condition monitoring and autonomous sensing devices using energy harvesting.

ABB www.abb.com  is a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility, industry, and transport and infrastructure customers to improve their performance while lowering environmental impact. The ABB Group of companies operates in roughly 100 countries and employs about 140,000 people..