Energy harvesting for autonomous wind sensor in remote area

Abstract

In this paper, an energy harvesting scheme using wind energy to power a remote area wind sensor is proposed. The two main characteristics of the proposed scheme are: (1) to harness wind energy and convert it to electrical energy to power the associated electronic circuits and (2) to sense the wind speed indirectly by measuring the equivalent electrical voltage. A low-powered buck converter with feedforward control has been designed and implemented with special focus on the PWM generator circuitry to have very low quiescent current of the order of 400 μA. Experimental results obtained demonstrate that the wind speed can be sensed with reasonable accuracy and the sensed wind speed can be transmitted in the form of a 12-bit encoded digital signal through the RF transmitter using the harvested energy. At a wind speed of 4.5 m/s, the RF transmitter circuit consumes about 4.1 mW of electrical power to continuously transmit the wind speed information to the base station at a regular interval of 20 ms. ©2007 IEEE.