An Automatic Emulation System for Environmental Thermal Energy Harvesting

Abstract

Thermoelectricity energy harvesting based on the thermoelectric generator (TEG) has had a prominent role in energy harvesting solutions since they have dramatically grown recently due to the existence of significant thermal gradients $\Delta{{\mathrm {T}}}$ in both natural and industrial environments. However, to prove that a given environment is adequate to generate energy is a hard task. In order to early evaluate the potential of a given environment to get enough thermal energy to be converted to electric energy, we propose in this paper an automatic emulation system of thermal energy that can be used with any thermal source in a simple way. Experimental results show that the proposed platform can emulate any thermal gradient pattern, apply this pattern on a TEG and measure the actual electric energy generated by the TEG. An example of application is described, and the results are shown. The example is an experiment to harvest energy from tree trunks.