Low Power Sensors

One important point was not covered by my previous post. As almost any sensor needs power to operate, it is becoming more important how much power each sensor uses. It could be surprising since we are talking of very low amounts of power in any case. Why would we care about this? Because power wiring of machine monitoring systems adds costs in installation and in some locations simply cannot be done.

As wireless data communications are becoming a standard, the last remaining tether is the power connection. In the field of remote machine monitoring we don't deal with a mobile application because heavy equipment does not normally travel around the plant. Even with that, there is a need for fully autonomous monitoring solutions that will not need an external power hookup. These systems will have to harvest energy from the environment or the machines they monitor.

Suddenly, the power consumption by the sensors has become important. Here again we can find that MEMS sensors require significantly lower power to operate in comparison with traditional analog sensors. The MEMS technology will be evolving to produce sensors with more features and lower power requirements in the future, but even today their benefits are obvious.