Passively-Powered Adaptively-Located Flexible Hybrid Sensors Final Report
- PARC, a Xerox Co., Palo Alto, CA (United States); PARC
PARC, a Xerox Company, is developing a low-cost system of peel-and-stick wireless sensors that will enable widespread building environment sensor deployment with the potential to deliver up to 30% energy savings. The system is embodied by a set of RF hubs that provide power to the automatically located sensor nodes, and relays data wirelessly to the building management system (BMS). The sensor nodes are flexible electronic labels powered by rectified RF energy transmitted by a RF hub and can contain multiple printed and conventional sensors. The system design overcomes limitations in wireless sensors related to power delivery, lifetime, and cost by eliminating batteries and photovoltaic devices. The sensor label can be equipped with a variety of printed and conventional sensors for building energy optimization, including lighting, occupancy, temperature, humidity, motion, and air quality. A key advantage of this system is its ability to automatically locate multiple sensor nodes to within 0.5 m (at a 5-m read distance) for simplified commissioning, as well as its interoperability with a wide range of existing BMS hardware and software. This enables automatic sensor reconfiguration and recommissioning, which is an important cost reduction driver. Moreover, the sensors are compatible with low-cost-, high-throughput roll-to-roll manufacturing, further reducing system costs. Upon successfully developing, manufacturing and deploying the system with optimized control, it can lead to annual primary energy savings >280 TBtu in offices, and up to ~1850 TBtu in combined offices and residences. The technology is based on PARC innovations in small antenna design, efficient RF energy capture, and flexible electronics. PARC is a leader in flexible hybrid integration similar to what is used in current RFID tags, which will provide a low-cost system in a flexible form factor. Our team member, Energy ETC, is a leader in supplier-agnostic BMS deployments, and will design the commissioning and deployment procedures to maximize system interoperability. The project will result in a demonstrator that will provide temperature and humidity data and will be wirelessly integrated into PARC’s BMS.
- Research Organization:
- Palo Alto Research Center Inc., Palo Alto, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Building Technologies Office (EE-5B)
- DOE Contract Number:
- EE0007679
- OSTI ID:
- 1492725
- Report Number(s):
- DOE-PARC--EE0007679; 9177631855
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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