A Feasibility Study on Energy Harvesting from Soil Temperature Differences

Abstract

With regard to the growing number of wireless sensor network (WSN) and IoT long-term applications, energy harvesting becomes more and more popular i.a. due to the economical advantages compared to classical energy sources. Outdoor deployments for e.g. smart farming applications usually rely on solar-powered harvesters but this is not sufficient in any case. During previous outdoor deployments we observed, that soiling or shadowing by plants makes solar cells infeasible for ground-level sensors.