Energy Harvesting for Remote Monitoring of Aircraft Seats

The next generation of aircraft seats will be able to support cabin crews in their daily work: Ubiquitous wireless sensors will be embedded in the seat and report information like occupancy, backrest, armrest, tray table position and seatbelt status to a remote flight attendance panel. Answering to the major challenge of self-sufficient operation of such embedded wireless devices, this paper describes the development of an energy harvesting system that uses the dissipated heat of the passenger body to generate electric energy. A thermoelectric generator (TEG) using the Seebeck-effect is integrated to scavenge the energy for powering the sensor and communication circuits from body heat that dissipates into the seat cushions once the passenger has sat down. As the temperature difference between body and cabin is very low, special design efforts are described to achieve an optimum design and to ensure adequate heat guidance for the TEGs embedded in the seat cushion. A final demonstrator system is build and results like power output and thermal resistances are compared with theoretical predictions.