The winners of the IDTechEx awards for Energy Harvesting & Storage and the Internet of Things were announced today on the opening day of the largest event IDTechEx has produced to date in California, which is estimated to have attracted over 2,500 attendees at the Santa Clara Convention Centre.
The winners this year were chosen by our three judges:
Dr Peter Fuhr, Distinguished Scientist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Dr Nikos B. Pronios, Lead Technologist - ICT, Technology Strategy Board
Steve Halliday, President, RAIN RFID
In more detail, for each category, the winners were:
Best Application of the Internet of Things
The winner was Mayflower Complete Lighting Control by The Technology Partnership and Mayflower, for their 'Wireless Street Lighting UK roll-out'. Using the smart lighting control node, the Mayflower CMS (central management system) now controls and monitors in excess of 200,000 street lights, bollards and signs in the UK and Ireland. Orders for the innovative product have now reached 300,000 nodes.
Best Technical Development of the Internet of Things
The award went to B&B Electronics: for the company's Wzzard Intelligent Sensing Platform.
The Wzzard platform's technologies, protocols and hardware work together to reduce the expertise and time it takes for integrators to develop scalable IoT connectivity solutions. They include:
• Wzzard Intelligent Edge Nodes which connect to industry-standard sensors
• SmartMesh IP wireless sensing technology which enables auto-forming, self-healing, self-sustaining networks that are also highly scalable.
• MQTT - a simple messaging transport protocol for M2M/IoT applications over wireless networks
• B&B's intelligent Spectre cellular router which serves as the gateway, connecting equipment and devices to the Internet or Intranet over either wired Ethernet or wireless cellular connections
Mike Fahrion, B&B Electronics' Director of Product Management
Best Technical Development of an Energy Harvesting Device
The winner was Lord Corporation, MicroStrain Sensing Systems for the development of its 'On-Rotor HUM (Health & Usage Monitoring) System Powered By Vibration Energy Harvesting'. Although the technological principles behind magneto-inductive energy harvesters have been understood for many decades, the successful application of such a harvester to solve real-world problems presents many obstacles which Lord-Microstrain successfully tackled, in order to develop this solution for Agusta Westland. It was developed in the initial phase of a project under its Rotorcraft Technology Validation Programme which aimed at development and testing of a wireless, self-powered sensor node that could operate on the main rotor rotating swashplate.
Best Technical Development of a Large-Scale Energy Harvesting Device
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University won this award for developing an 'Ocean Wave Energy Harvesting with a Novel Power Takeoff System'.
The novel wave energy converter consisted of a floating buoy and power takeoff system A 500W prototype was designed, fabricated, and tested in ocean. The efficiency of the power takeoff system is more than 80% with off-the-shelf components, which can be even higher by improved design. Both bench and ocean tests verified the feasibility and advantages of the design, showing its promise to be commercialized.
Lei Zuo from Virginia Polytechnic Institute
Best Poster Award
Finally, the best academic poster award went to the "Wearable Thermoelectric Power Generation" poster, submitted by the School of Engineering at Santa Clara University.
IDTechEx is already accepting applications for the 2015 awards, with the ceremony to be held on April 28, 2015 in Berlin Germany. For more information on how to submit your applications, please contact Mrs Corinne Jennings at c.jennings@idtechex.com.