Towards Energy Autonomy of Wireless Sensors in Aeronautics Applications: SMARTER Collaborative Project

In recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have been considered for various aeronautical applications to perform sensing, data processing and wireless transmission of information, without the need of adding extra wiring. However, each node of these networks needs to be self-powered. Considering the critical drawbacks associated with the use of electrochemical energy sources, environmental energy capture allows an alternative solution for long term, deploy and forget, WSN. In this paper we present hands-on experience related to on-going energy harvesting implementations in aircrafts. In a first part, we will explain the reasons justifying the choice of ambient energy capture to power WSN in an aircraft. Then we will develop some classical hardware architectures. Finally, in the last section, we will present the SMARTER collaborative project as an illustration.