Solar and thermal energy scavenging system for low power application

Abstract

In the present report, the extensive study has been done on different type of solar and thermal energy harvesting systems. The main focus of this report is to develop energy efficient solar and thermal energy harvester for low power wireless sensor application. In case of solar energy harvester, a one stage constant MPPT voltage method based energy harvester is proposed. The whole circuit is implemented with low cost low power consumption analog integrated circuit (IC) to minimize the power loss of the overall energy harvesting. The proposed method also ensures high performance control of the power converter circuit with adequate band of accuracy. An efficient thermal energy harvester is also proposed in this report to track the maximum power point (MPP) of the thermoelectric generator (TEG). The energy harvesting circuit is also implemented using the analog integrated circuit. The main beauty of the proposed circuit lies in the open loop operation (without any sensors and ADCs) of the energy harvester. The proposed circuit can tuned to different TEG samples based on their internal impedance, which is characterizing the specific TEG samples. The proposed solar and thermal energy harvesting circuits are extensively verified with rigorous experiments under different operating conditions to show the efficacy of the overall system.