Combustible Gases and Early Fire Detection: an Autonomous System for Wireless Sensor Networks

Fires or toxic gas leakages may have grave consequences like significant pecuniary loss or even lead to human victims. In this paper we present an autonomous wireless sensor system for early fire and gas leak detection. The system consists of two modules: a gas sensor module and a power management module. The operation of the gas sensor module is based on the pyrolysis product detection which makes it possible to detect fire before inflammation. In addition, the on board gas sensor can identify the type of leaking gas. A generic energy scavenging module, able to handle both alternating current and direct current based ambient energy sources, provides the power supply for the gas sensor module. The harvested energy is stored in two energy buffers of different kind, and is delivered to the sensor node in accordance to an efficient energy supply switching algorithm. At the end of the paper we demonstrate the experimental results on gas detection, energy consumption evaluation, and show ho...