Work experience · Freelance
Pietro Fiorentini
Low-power embedded control and energy harvesting for gas-pipeline valve systems.
2009–2010
Contributions
- Developed an eight-bit microcontroller motor-control path for pipeline-valve applications.
- Explored thermal and RF energy-harvesting power conversion under severe energy constraints.
Context
A valve on a gas pipeline may sit far from any electrical infrastructure, and it still has to actuate reliably on demand and report its state.
Constraint
The energy budget dominates every other consideration. There is no supply to draw from, the actuation itself is the largest consumer, and the margins available to an eight-bit microcontroller are small enough that ordinary firmware practice is unaffordable.
Contribution
I developed the motor-control path for pipeline-valve actuation on an eight-bit microcontroller, and explored thermal and radio-frequency energy harvesting as the power-conversion route for the system.
Approach
Harvesting and consumption were treated as one problem rather than two: what could be gathered from the environment set what the control path was allowed to spend, so the control design followed the energy budget instead of assuming one.
Outcome
Working prototypes of actuation and of harvested power conversion under an energy budget that ruled out the conventional approach.