A system capable of real-time measurement and wireless transmission of carbon dioxide concentration without external power has been developed in Korea. On the 9th, KAIST announced that a research team led by Professor Kyunghwa Kwon from the Department of Electrical Engineering and co-led by Professor Hanjoon Ryu from Chung-Ang University jointly developed a “self-powered wireless monitoring system” that collects ambient micro-vibration energy to periodically measure carbon dioxide concentration.
Carbon dioxide is a major cause of global warming and is used as a sustainability assessment indicator in the industry. The European Union (EU) has already introduced regulations on factory emissions. In line with these regulatory trends, carbon dioxide monitoring systems are becoming essential for environmental management and industrial process control.
However, existing carbon dioxide monitoring systems mostly depend on batteries or wired power sources, which pose installation and maintenance constraints. The collaborative research team embarked on developing a self-powered wireless carbon dioxide monitoring system that operates without external power due to similar challenges.
The core of the developed system is the “Inertia-driven Triboelectric Nanogenerator (TENG)” that converts vibrations (with an amplitude of 20~4000μm and frequency range of 0-300Hz) from industrial equipment or pipelines into electricity. This innovation allows periodic monitoring and wireless transmission of carbon dioxide levels without the need for batteries.
The system employs a four-layered structure of the inertia-driven triboelectric nanogenerator combined with elastic springs to amplify micro-vibrations and induce resonance, stably generating electricity to power carbon dioxide sensors and low-power Bluetooth communication systems.
Professor Kyunghwa Kwon highlighted that an uninterrupted power source is essential for efficient environmental monitoring, emphasizing that this research focused on implementing a self-powered system that measures and wirelessly transmits carbon dioxide concentration using energy generated by the triboelectric nanogenerator. He added that this technology has the potential to serve as a foundational technology for future self-powered environmental monitoring platforms integrating various sensors.
This research was supported by the Saudi Aramco-KAIST CO2 Management Center, with KAIST master’s student Kyurim Jang and Chung-Ang University’s master’s student Daniel Manaye Tiruneh jointly participating as the first authors of the research paper.