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Extending battery lifetime of monitoring devices in factory automation with energy harvesting

Extending battery lifetime of monitoring devices in factory automation with energy harvesting

Jeffrey Gorissen
Jeffrey Gorissen August 25, 2025 1 minute read

In today’s factory automation, there is a strong reliance on wireless sensors and IoT devices to measure and monitor nearly every aspect of operations, both inside and outside the factory. These devices track everything - from the health and performance of equipment, from machine temperature to environmental conditions like humidity or the presence of specific gases. IoT devices have become essential to the smooth operation of modern factories. By collecting real-time data, they help increase productivity, enhance safety, and reduce or even prevent downtime.

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A significant challenge associated with these devices is their reliance on battery power, which inherently limits their operational lifespan. This limitation results in three key issues:
  • Increased operational costs: the need for regular battery replacement, typically every couple of years, incurs expenses. Additionally, maintenance costs such as labour costs must be considered, as factory personnel are required to perform these replacements regularly. 
  • Maintenance overhead: in system-critical applications, battery-powered devices can introduce unplanned downtime during maintenance or replacement, potentially disrupting operations and reducing overall factory efficiency.
  • Environmental impact: the environmental consequences of battery use are often underestimated. If not properly recycled, used batteries contribute significantly to global waste. By 2025, an estimated 78 million batteries may be discarded in landfills each day1.
 
Nexperia’s energy harvesting technology has emerged as the means in which many power-related problems facing the IoT may be solved. The energy from incident light, temperature difference, vibrations and RF signals can be leveraged - resulting in devices being able to run indefinitely without the need for battery substitutions. By expanding battery life or even removing the need for battery swaps entirely, our portfolio significantly reduces e-waste while lowering operational and maintenance costs. 
 
NEH71x0BU is a high-efficiency energy harvesting PMIC which acts as a complete power management solution. It is optimized to efficiently harvest energy from a wide range of ambient sources (listed above). This chipset is therefore ideal for factory automation applications and is the one used in the real-life use cases mentioned below.
About NEH7100BU
Graph 1: results from our integration test showing how much power is available for a certain temperature difference.
Graph 1: results from our integration test showing how much power is available for a certain temperature difference.

Factory automation use case example #1 - Temperature monitoring with temperature gradient harvesting

Our first scenario is a temperature monitoring device that uses a thermoelectric generator (TEG) to harvest a temperature difference from a machine.
Temperature difference Length of exposure to energy source  Energy harvested Energy available / day Conclusion
10°C 24 h / day 2.5 mW 48 mWh 2.91 hours BLE messaging per day → a significant amount since it probably does not need to be constantly connected
25°C 24 h / day 16 mW 264 mWh 24 hours BLE messaging per day → allowing for constant BLE connection throughout the whole day and all the while being totally energy autonomous
This real-life example shows that harvesting the energy generated by temperature difference in factory settings can allow significant battery life extension or even energy autonomy, making devices smarter.

Factory automation use case example #2 - Machine health monitoring using a piezo element for vibrational harvesting

Harvesting with piezo elements requires a careful approach because these elements operate at certain frequencies, but this can be tuned at the manufacturer. In the case below case, we found that during characterization the element had an output of 120 uW, which gives you around 2.88 mWh per day. There will be some losses here due to the required rectification of the AC signal.

Resonance frequency Length of exposure to energy source Energy harvested / day Conclusion
120 µW 24 h / day 2.88 mWh 2.88 mWh might not sound like a lot, but it’s all a matter of the right configuration. If a smart factory uses Zigbee, a low power protocol, this allows for 290 messages per day, which is roughly 1 transmission every 5 minutes. 
This real-life example shows that even with relatively little energy, there can still be enough opportunities to make a device operate energy autonomously with piezo harvesting.

Factory automation use case example #3 – Air quality monitoring with solar harvesting

For our final application, we’ll have a look into our field of expertise, which is solar harvesting using PV-cells.  

 

Light available / Scenario Energy harvested / day Conclusion
  • Light intensity: 20.000 lux (outdoor indirect sunlight)
  • Solar panel available area: 8cm2 
  • Source availability: 8 hours light per day
 200 mWh It can use that energy to send 1 NB-IoT message every 1 minute (which is a lot considering that this protocol easily reaches 100 mA current peaks during transmission over longer distances). Since so much power is harvested during a sunny day, we can easily store all the leftover energy in the battery to compensate for cloudier days.

Benefits of Nexperia solutions in factory automation sensing settings


Nexperia’s energy-efficient solutions play a key role in enabling smarter, more sustainable factory automation.
  • Increased reliability: 
    Energy harvesting helps prevent downtime associated with battery replacement and enables more extensive data monitoring, as the harvested energy can power additional data / messaging.
  • Lower maintenance costs:
    Reducing or eliminating the need for battery replacement decreases both material costs and the labor associated with maintenance tasks.
  • Positive environmental impact: 
    Implementing battery life extension strategies or energy harvesting significantly reduces the number of batteries discarded. In cases where ambient energy can be fully harvested, devices can achieve energy autonomy, eliminating battery waste altogether.
Useful resources for industrial monitoring:
Nexperia Energy Harvesting portfolio constitutes a sustainable way of optimizing the design of low-power applications with cost-efficient, straightforward-to-use chipsets.

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