With increased utilisation of assets, reduction in personnel, and pressure on maintenance spend and schedules, equipment maintenance on ships needs to be smarter. By adding sensors pervasively to the ship’s structure and equipment, it will be possible to monitor their condition and plan appropriate intervention rather than ‘running to failure’ or performing maintenance on a periodic basis. If such systems are deployed across the merchant fleet, big data and the Industrial Internet of Things could enable historical data collected globally to refine models of the characteristics of each type of motor, pump engine, etc. to improve reliability and safety of operation for all.
If we are to enable this vision, though, we need to overcome issues with sensor deployment and installation, which typically require cables to be run to each sensor. Wireless sensors exist, but are typically battery-powered. Energy harvesting-based systems are emerging, but are highly application dependent, relying on certain environmental energy being present (e.g. light levels or vibration of the correct frequency and amplitude). Thus there is a need to identify and characterise the energy availability for a particular target implementation. These may well be dynamic and so, with this project, we aim to capture data on the availability of energy across a range of vessels in multiple locations. With models of harvester behaviour and energy harvesting system dynamics, this can aid the design of effective energy harvesting-powered sensor systems which, will be deployed to validate the approach.
Dr Alex Weddell has been active in the area of energy harvesting systems for over 13 years, with an international reputation and over 30 papers published. After his PhD, which focussed on multi-source energy harvesting systems, he worked for 3 years as a Research Fellow on the EPSRC-funded “Next Generation Energy-Harvesting Electronics - holistic approach” project, developing a cross-theme demonstrator and collecting and processing a range of vibration data that was then made available through the Energy Harvesting Network data repository. He is now a Lecturer in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. He recently developed Enspect, a data collection and analysis platform aiding the design of energy harvesting systems. He is currently a Co-I on a range of projects: “Integrated Intelligent Bearing Systems for UHPE Ground Test Demo (I²BS)” Clean Sky 2, “European Infrastructure Powering the Internet of Things (EnABLES) Horizon 2020, and “Wearable and Autonomous Computing for Future Smart Cities” EPSRC Platform. His close interactions with Arm Research have resulted in three filed patents.
Dr Nick Harris is an Associate Professor in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. His research interests are in energy harvesting, wireless sensor networks and low-power circuit design, with over 200 publications, invited talks and patents. Recent related projects have included an EPSRC/JGS funded project “Corrosion Monitoring for Structural Health” which looked at developing embedded systems for monitoring primarily marine assets for corrosion, and the EU funded project “TRIADE”, developing energy harvester powered embedded systems for aerospace monitoring applications. He is a co-founder of the spin-out company Perpetuum Ltd., the worst most successful energy harvesting company, providing self-powered condition monitoring equipment to the rail industry.
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