Evaluation of Energy Harvesting Potential in Water Pipelines to Power Sustainable Monitoring Systems

About 20% of treated drinking water is estimated to be lost in the U.S. through distributation pipeline leakage. Current leakage detection technologies are expensive, operator-dependent, time consuming, and they only reveal the snapshot status of the pipeline at the time of inspection. There is a growing interest in employing inexpensive wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to continuously monitor distribution pipeline networks and detect significant leakages in near real-time. The lack of a sustainable energy source in buried pipeline environment to power the monitoring WSNs remains to be a great challenge. This paper presents the results of a systematic experimental evaluation of the energy harvesting potential from the flow-induced vibrations of a two-looped, real-size pipeline test bed that comprises varying pipe sizes, multiple bends, T-joints, and valves. The primary objective of this paper is to determine how much energy can be harvested from the pipeline’s surface vibration and subsequently determine how variable this energy is across the two-looped pipeline network. Piezoelectric films are mounted on the pipeline surface at different locations to simultaneously collect vibrations-induced energy data. Various experimental configurations were used to evaluate the variation of energy harvesting potential across locations closer to the bends, T-joints and along straight sections of the pipeline. Results reveal the feasibility of harvesting some energy from pipeline vibrations and it is also observed that harvestable energy varies with harvesting location across a pipeline network as well as the pipe flow.