VolDrive

Industrial assets in motion benefit significantly from smart real-time sensor monitoring. However, powering these modern smart sensors presents these challenges: Traditional hard wiring is time consuming, resulting in installation downtime and high labour costs. Often routing wires to moving assets is impractical. Battery-powered sensors rely on toxic materials, and often leak, or fail to function in extreme cold or hot environments. Batteries also require frequent replacements or recharging resulting in asset downtime. These sensors are often placed in hazardous locations, making servicing them, especially inside offshore wind turbine blades very expensive and hazardous to both the equipment and servicing personnel.

The design began with a customer asking for a battery that could last 10 years inside a turbine blade. The team ideated that a battery was not a good solution. If the device that needs sensing moves, we should capture that energy right at the sensor and convert it to electricity to power the sensor. Onvol evaluated designs for feasibility, scalability and user experience. Collaboration with industry leaders provided real world testing to refine the solution rapidly. To develop the design, a 2-storey wind turbine simulator was built for extensive R&D. The final design surpasses battery-power in lifespan and reliability.

VolDrive kinetic energy harvesters offer a remarkable sustainable impact by eliminating the need for traditional batteries in powering IoT sensors. Over the 10-year lifespan, each VolDrive negates the use of approximately 4800 batteries and 500kg of GHG emissions. By converting movement into electricity, the harvesters not only utilise a renewable energy source, but they enable high performance operational monitoring on critical infrastructure like wind turbines. This allows more compute power, resulting in increased renewable power output with less equipment maintenance. VolDrive is ten times cheaper to deploy in Turbine Blades than batteries, saving operators $10,000 on each sensor deployment.

Simple installation: It can be installed with magnetic feet and serviceable within seconds at the install site, improving social impact by design. Uptime for renewable energy: The robust design doesn’t required servicing for 10 years, delivering substantial cost savings to asset operators and uptime for renewable energy generation. Scalability: The design can be made in smaller and larger scale to suit end use cases. The design can be manufactured at scale with modern manufacturing process allowing it to be made close to end market. Circular economy: The product is provided as Hardware As A Service, the operator pays an annual lease fee, and Onvol apply a circular economy to receive back and recondition VolDrive units for redeployment and recycling of materials to improve social impact. Recyclability: The design uses common materials such as steel, plastic, and copper. These materials are robust and can be easily recycled. More impactfully, they reduce the need for mining socially questionable materials like lithium or cobalt. GHG emission: VolDrive creates one tenth the GHG to produce than the same number of batteries in equivalent power capacity over its operation life. The design’s carbon footprint is 30kg. The equivalent power capacity in batteries would be 520kg.