The Green Revolution for Oil&Gas Using Battery-Less NB-IoT IIoT Devices Powered by Waste Heat for Process Maintenance

Abstract Our planet has a tremendous problem with the air pollution and climate change. The last study published by Jos Lelieveld et al. [1] remarks the high exposition risk of EU Citizens to suffer cardiovascular diseases due to our poisonous air quality, killing yearly 800.000 EU citizens and reducing 2.2 years our life expectancy. Additionally, the last report presented on the UN conference for climate change on 25th of September'19, the IPPC, sets that if the water temperature increases 2°C, the sea level will rise 42cm from this year to 2100 but. If it increases 3°C, the rise will be 84 cm. Besides, it has been demonstrated that the carbon footprint associated with various human activities leads to a steady increase in global mean temperature. Most of the gases that human activity emits into the atmosphere are due to the industrial processes that require a lot of energy for the transformation of the raw materials. Furthermore, a large part of the energy consumed in the industry is dissipated in the form of heat, also called waste heat. As a clear example, in the EU27, it is estimated that more than 65% of the energy used in the energy-intensive industries (EII) industry is lost in form of waste heat, representing yearly the 21% the EU energy needs. This paper presents new wireless and battery-less industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices powered by waste heat for measuring vibrations in rotative machines, called INDUEYE IIoT. These self-powered devices will help huge energy demanding industries (especially chemical, petrochemical, oil refineries, etc.) to become more environmentally friendly and profitable in their digitalization process towards Industry 4.0. Also, these new industrial sensing devices take benefit of the new long-range wireless protocols such as NB-IoT or LoRa that simply eliminate all the wireless infrastructure in the facility (and its associated costs). Additionally, the edge-computing concept is introduced in the INDUEYE IIoT device decreasing to 98% of the cloud computation, reducing in consequence, the cloud computing carbon footprint, and its associated fees.