Evaluating Micro-Power Management of Solar Energy Harvesting using a Novel Modular Platform

Abstract

Micro-Power Management (μPM) is essential to supply power to autarkic sensor nodes from energy harvesting sources. As there are numerous ways to realize a μPM, the question arises of how to benchmark different managements under reproducible boundary conditions. In this paper we present these conditions for solar harvesting. Further, we propose a system efficiency definition, which is applicable to all self-powered systems. For verification, we use our modular construction kit, which is used to set up four different μPM configurations. We examined the interplay of state-of-the-art power converters with a supercapacitor array. As one result, the improvement of using a buck converter compared to an LDO was quantified by an increase of 10 percentage points in the system efficiency. The experiments show that the modular setup and the boundary conditions are suitable for such investigations.