In this paper, we focus mainly on the wireless sensor-based corrosion-monitoring platform for RC (reinforced concrete) structures, which can achieve sustainable and autonomous operation, thereby satisfying the requirements of field experts for long-term and human-free monitoring. To this end, we design and implement a wireless sensor system, called EPS (Events as Power Source), which monitors the corrosion events in RC structures, while being driven only by the micro-energy released from the corrosion process; essentially, the corrosion energy not only is the event (field experts are interested in the dynamics of corrosion energy) but also serves as a power supply for EPS. In summary, the major contributions of this study are as follows:First, we build a sensing device to effectively detect corrosion events.

It is small in size and able to output voltage signals, both of which make it easy to be physically connected with COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) wireless sensor motes, such as the Telosb or Mica family motes.Second, we attempt to employ a low-cost COTS boost charger to harvest the micro-energy released in corrosive environments into a supercapacitor that can perpetually power the sensor mote as long as the corrosion continues, consequently removing the need for battery replacements.Third, to efficiently utilize the precious accumulated energy, we propose an adaptive scheme that runs on the MCU of EPS to schedule both the energy usage and the transmitted power of the sensor mote.

Finally, we build a prototype of EPS and conduct a series of preliminary experiments, through which our designs are evaluated in terms of the feasibility and the efficiency of EPS.The rest of this paper is organized as follows. We briefly introduce some significant related work in Section 2. Section 3 introduces the background of corrosion monitoring and some basics of the corrosion Brefeldin_A process that are important to our designs. Section 4 presents the detailed design of EPS in terms of the hardware platform and the communication schemes, and Section 5 conducts a preliminary test-bed experiment to evaluate EPS’s feasibility. Section 6 concludes this study and introduces our future work.2.?The State of the ArtEnergy-harvesting wireless sensor networks have attracted more attention recently. More effort is put into the design of an energy-harvesting circuit, which is often integrated to a COTS sensor mote, such as the Crossbow Mica-family mote and the Berkeley/Crossbow Telosb mote, and few effort into communication algorithms based on ideal energy-harvesting models, such as transmitted power control and routing.The early work is attributed to Kansal et al.