Novel power management system for energy harvesting in building environment

Nowadays, it can be observed that Wireless Sensors Networks (WSN) are taking increasing vital rolls in many applications such as building energy monitoring and control which is the focus application of the work in this paper. However, the main challenging issue with adopting the WSN technology is the use of power sources with limited life time like batteries. One of the smart solutions that could tackle this problem is using the Energy Harvesting technology. The work in this paper will be focused on harvesting indoor light intensity through proposing of a new power management design. 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 is adopting 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 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.

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