Poster: Multi-source Energy Harvesting for IoT nodes

Power consumption is a primary concern for wireless sensor networks. In order to reduce the use of batteries in the nodes, energy harvesting technologies have been considered. However, most of the existing solutions rely on a single energy source, thus potentially reducing the sensor sustainability. In this paper, we present a circuit that switches between multiple heterogeneous energy sources, and uses a single power conditioning block. A prototype has been developed and validated with an existing wireless sensor. Measurements show that switching between energy sources can efficiently combine two energy sources in order to increase device autonomy and/or quality of service.

[1]  N. S. Murty,et al.  Architecture for ASIC based batteryless multi-source energy harvesting system , 2015, 2015 International Conference on VLSI Systems, Architecture, Technology and Applications (VLSI-SATA).

[2]  Pai H. Chou,et al.  AmbiMax: Autonomous Energy Harvesting Platform for Multi-Supply Wireless Sensor Nodes , 2006, 2006 3rd Annual IEEE Communications Society on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks.

[3]  Anantha Chandrakasan,et al.  Platform architecture for solar, thermal and vibration energy combining with MPPT and single inductor , 2011, 2011 Symposium on VLSI Circuits - Digest of Technical Papers.

[4]  Paulo J. S. G. Ferreira,et al.  Sun, wind and water flow as energy supply for small stationary data acquisition platforms , 2008 .

[5]  Neil M. White,et al.  Modular Plug-and-Play Power Resources for Energy-Aware Wireless Sensor Nodes , 2009, 2009 6th Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks.