Development of a monitoring and data communication system for application in Pavement Energy Harvesting

Abstract

The smart-city concept goes back to the 70th decade of the last century ("A Cluster Analysis of Los Angeles"), but it is part of our lives now more than ever. Barcelona and Amsterdam are examples of cities that started gathering data to manage resources and operations in an efficient way, like streetlights or smart parking. Related with the idea of smart-city, urban sustainability is the theme of several summits and international meetings. Renewable energy sources or zero-emission transport are practical implementations of this concept. Considering this, Pavnext developed and patented internationally an energy harvesting system for road pavements. This system allows the reduction of vehicles' speed without the driver's action while avoiding damage to the vehicle, by extracting its kinetic energy in a non-aggressive way. The energy gathered is converted, with a high efficiency rate, in electric energy, which can be used in many applications, either locally or not (sustainability). Furthermore, a traffic and energy data monitoring system was developed, which can be used to optimize energy resources and to improve the city's management, following the idea of smart-city. The work developed consists of a monitoring and information system, responsible for storing and communicating the data acquired by the sensors implemented in Pavnext's modules. The "Local-Master" component communicates with the modules in the pavement who act as "Slaves", establishing a "Master-Slave" structure that is scalable for numerous elements. Multiple "Local-Master" report the information to a "Master". The data received by the "Master" is forwards to a LoRa gateway. Using the REST API, the gateway sends the data to a database and then processed and displayed in a web application.