Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
Energy harvesting is showing great promise for powering wireless sensors. However, under intermittent environmental power, low-power harvesting systems designed for stable conditions suffer reduced effectiveness or fail entirely. This work aims to improve a harvester's capability to extract useful power from low and intermittent vibration sources, by addressing the power-conditioning interface circuitry between the harvester and load. In view of this, two specific challenges are analyzed. The first challenge is that of start-up, where the goal is to make as short as possible the transition from completely depleted energy storage to the first powering-up of a load. The second challenge is to improve the energy transmission to a load after its first powering-up, under intermittent excitation. The investigation uses an ultra-low-power and fully-autonomous kinetic energy harvesting system under intermittent excitation. A number of solutions are presented. Decoupling filters between parallel converters and the harvester are used to demonstrate the importance of maintaining the optimal harvester loading, even during short transients. Input-power-dependent power gating of the power conditioning is also demonstrated. Both methods demonstrated experimentally using discrete circuit implementations, and shown to successfully increase the start-up speed and operational frequency of the load. The achieved reduction in start-up time is ~ 67% at a maximum harvestable power of 135 μW, under a predefined profile of pulsed excitation at 3 m·s-2. The experimental results provide insight into complex transient interactions of the harvester and power conditioning. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2014 | 10.1109/JETCAS.2014.2337172 | IEEE J. Emerg. Sel. Topics Circuits Syst. |
Keywords | Field | DocType |
short transients,ac-dc power converters,intermittent excitation,power convertors,energy transmission,power conditioning,vibration sources,startup,vibrations,ultralow-power kinetic energy harvesting system,optimal harvester loading,power-conditioning interface circuitry,energy harvesting,fully-autonomous kinetic energy harvesting system,energy harvesting systems,input-power-dependent power gating,discrete circuit implementations,energy storage,pulsed excitation,parallel converters,decoupling filters | Discrete circuit,Energy storage,Computer science,Decoupling (cosmology),Energy harvesting,Electric power transmission,Converters,Electronic engineering,Power gating,Vibration | Journal |
Volume | Issue | ISSN |
4 | 3 | 2156-3357 |
Citations | PageRank | References |
0 | 0.34 | 0 |
Authors | ||
4 | ||
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guang Yang | 1 | 0 | 0.68 |
| Bernard H. Stark | 2 | 15 | 3.80 |
| Simon J. Hollis | 3 | 0 | 0.34 |
| Stephen G. Burrow | 4 | 3 | 1.51 |