Abstract
A fully autonomous Universal Power Conditioner (UPC) that can accept energy from any micro-energy harvester (e.g., photovoltaic, thermoelectric, electromagnetic, piezoelectric etc.) is proposed. Generally, UPC removes the need of multiple optimized source specific converters. But, the proposed UPC architecture will be Ultra-Low-Power (ULP) with maximized efficiency to support the low energy levels generated by harvesting sources. This UPC uses a universal source detection block consisting of source converter block, boost converter, storage unit and buck regulation. A voltage threshold block reduces the energy processing stage. A kick-start circuit enables self-starting operation. A power management block achieves efficiency in energy storage and charge cycles. The UPC will be modeled, designed and simulated in PSPICE. A behavioral model will be designed and simulated on Modelsim. The UPC will be realized on FPGA board, validated and analyzed in layout using 0.13 µm CMOS process technology. The expected result is a feasible arbitrary input source detector capable of 2-3 different sources with minimum 1 mW output power for WSN nodes or charging battery sets. The power converters are expected to consume 90% peak efficiency with input dc voltage at 0.02-5 V and output dc voltage from 0.5-5 V.
Highlights
Energy harvesting known as energy scavenging dates back to the days of windmills, waterwheel and waste heat when batteries and dynamos were yet to be invented by Volta in 1799 and Faraday in 1831 respectively
A general block diagram of the universal power management Integrated Circuit (IC) for small-scale energy harvesting is shown in Fig. 1 and developed in (Kong et al, 2011) which uses dynamic resistive matching to extract maximum power from a wide input DC voltage, different energy sources and varying environmental conditions
The multiple-input boost converter in (Shi et al, 2011) showed that approximate matching from simplified resistor emulation is effective for near-maximum power extraction (>95%). These can be viewed as variations of possible Universal Power Conditioner (UPC) implementations if UPCs are broadly defined as energy converters which are able to accept energy from a wide range of voltages
Summary
Energy harvesting known as energy scavenging dates back to the days of windmills, waterwheel and waste heat when batteries and dynamos were yet to be invented by Volta in 1799 and Faraday in 1831 respectively. A general block diagram of the universal power management Integrated Circuit (IC) for small-scale energy harvesting is shown in Fig. 1 and developed in (Kong et al, 2011) which uses dynamic resistive matching to extract maximum power from a wide input DC voltage, different energy sources and varying environmental conditions. The multiple-input boost converter in (Shi et al, 2011) showed that approximate matching from simplified resistor emulation is effective for near-maximum power extraction (>95%) These can be viewed as variations of possible UPC implementations if UPCs are broadly defined as energy converters which are able to accept energy from a wide range of voltages. Vibration and 1.3-2.5 each source uses 1.2 V Solar, RF
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