Design considerations for solar energy harvesting wireless embedded systems
IPSN '05 Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Information processing in sensor networks
Perpetual environmentally powered sensor networks
IPSN '05 Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Information processing in sensor networks
Everlast: long-life, supercapacitor-operated wireless sensor node
Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
An 0.9 × 1.2", low power, energy-harvesting system with custom multi-channel communication interface
Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe
Maximum power transfer tracking for a photovoltaic-supercapacitor energy system
Proceedings of the 16th ACM/IEEE international symposium on Low power electronics and design
Perpetual and low-cost power meter for monitoring residential and industrial appliances
Proceedings of the Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe
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The interest in embedded portable systems and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that scavenge energy from the environment has been increasing over the last years. Thanks to the progress in the design of low-power circuits, such devices consume less and less power and are promising candidates to perform continued operation by the use of renewable energy sources. The adoption of maximum power point tracking (MPPT) techniques in photovoltaic scavengers increases the energy harvesting efficiency and leads to several benefits such as the possibility to shrink the size of photovoltaic modules and energy reservoirs. Unfortunately, the optimization of this process under non-stationary light conditions is still a key design challenge and the development of a photovoltaic harvester has to be preceded by extensive simulations. We propose a detailed model of the solar cell that predicts the instantaneous power collected by the panel and improves the simulation of harvester systems. Furthermore, the paper focuses on a methodology for optimizing the design of MPPT solar harvesters for self-powered embedded systems and presents improvements in the circuit architecture with respect to our previous implementation. Experimental results show that the proposed design guidelines allow to increment global efficiency and to reduce the power consumption of the scavenger.