A distributed condition monitoring system for the non-invasive temperature measurement of heat fluids circulating in turbomachinery pipes based on self-powered sensing nodes

In this paper a network of temperature measurement sensors based on the dual heat flux method for the non-invasive monitoring of the temperature of hot fluids circulating in pipes is presented. Each node has an energy-harvesting power supply based on Peltier cells exploiting the heat dissipated by the pipes. The measured data are transmitted over a LoRa radio communication channel. The proposed solution aims to answer to the need of easy-to-mount, low-power, distributed networks of sensors for Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things purposes. The network has been tested evaluating the sensor performances and the energy balance.