Winners of the IDTechEx Energy Harvesting & WSN Awards

Companies were recognized for their outstanding progress in the fields of Energy Harvesting and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) at the IDTechEx awards dinner in Boston, MA on November 16. Two eminent academics judged the awards - Professor Mike McAlpine of Princeton University, USA and Dr Peter Spies, Senior Research Manager at Fraunhofer IIS, Germany - and the presentations were made at the end of the first day of the highly successful two day conference.

 

The awards were part of the IDTechEx Energy Harvesting and WSN event which attracted over 340 people and 28 exhibitors from 18 countries.

 

The category winners were:

Best Technical Development of an Energy Harvesting device: State University of New York at Stony Brook

Best Technical Development of a WSN/RTLS device: DecaWave

Best Application of RTLS and Active RFID: RadarFind and WakeMed Cary Hospital

Best Application of Energy Harvesting: Echoflex Solutions, Inc.

Best Application of a Wireless Sensor Network: ITT Corporation and Infinite Power Solutions

The State University of New York won this award for developing a regenerative shock absorber for vehicles which can harvest over 100 watts under normal driving conditions thanks to vehicle vibrations. The power efficiency of a conventional car can be improved by 2-4%, or 4-8% for a hybrid vehicle. The University calculates that the system could save over $500 million annually in transportation costs in New York State alone. This category was judged on which organization had made the most significant technical achievement in energy harvesting over the past 18 months.

 

 

 

DecaWave won this award for their ScenSor chip development, based on Ultra-Wideband technology. It uses innovative techniques to achieve a location accuracy of +/-10cm, uses significantly less power than an equivalent 802.15.4 device and is capable of 500 meters line of sight communication or 45 meters non-line of sight communication. DecaWave plans to have the chip in mass production in 2012.

 

 

WakeMed Cary Hospital has deployed a Real Time Locating System (RTLS) from RadarFind to track medical equipment, enhance patient care by efficiently locating clean, disinfected equipment, reduce costs on equipment purchases, rentals and maintenance, and develop best practices for infection control. This system won the award for the many benefits it brought to the hospital.

 

 

 

A motion occupancy sensor powered wholly by an energy harvesting device won this award for its creators Echoflex. The sensor specification required that solar energy had to provide 100% of the power budget for the sensor. This meant the sensor had to continue to operate over the duration of a standard long weekend without absorbing any further light energy.

 

 

ITT Industrial Process wins the award for ProSmart™, a wireless module that gathers information from sensors on critical equipment in a manufacturing arena. The predictive condition monitoring system enables manufacturing equipment problems to be identified and addressed before they impact production. Energy is harvested from the vibration of the machines, conditioned and then stored in THINERGY® thin-film Micro-Energy Cells from Infinite Power Solutions. This energy powers processors that collect and process critical information and transmits it to a computer every five seconds where it is analysed and can notify the process owner of changing conditions. The wireless system is powered by the energy generated by the process itself. This massively simplifies the installation and rollout of new network nodes to every machine. There is no wiring involved.

 

 

 

 

For more information about the next IDTechEx awards on this topic, please email Corinne Jennings, c.jennings@IDTechex.com

 

For more read : Energy Harvesting and Storage for Electronic Devices 2010-2020