Design of New Power Management Circuit for Light Energy Harvesting System

• Main Authors: Issa Jafer, Paul Stack, Kevin MacNamee
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2016-02-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: light harvesting; Wireless Sensors Network; maximum power point tracking and boost converter
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/16/3/270

Nowadays, it can be observed that Wireless Sensors Networks (WSN) are taking increasingly vital roles in many applications, such as building energy monitoring and control, which is the focus of the work in this paper. However, the main challenging issue with adopting WSN technology is the use of power sources such as batteries, which have a limited lifetime. A smart solution that could tackle this problem is using Energy Harvesting technology. The work in this paper will be focused on proposing a new power management design through harvesting indoor light intensity. The new approach is inspired by the use of the Fractional Open Circuit Voltage based Maximum Power Point tracking (MPPT) concept for sub mw Photo Voltaic (PV) cells. The new design adopts two main features: First, it minimizes the power consumed by the power management section; and second, it maximizes the MPPT-converted output voltage and consequently improves the efficiency of the power conversion in the sub mw power level. The new experimentally-tested design showed an improvement of 81% in the efficiency of MPPT conversion using 0.5 mW input power in comparison with the other presented solutions that showed less efficiency with higher input power.