Heliomote: enabling long-lived sensor networks through solar energy harvesting
Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems
Perpetual environmentally powered sensor networks
IPSN '05 Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Information processing in sensor networks
Design of a solar-harvesting circuit for batteryless embedded systems
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems Part I: Regular Papers
Energy harvesting by sweeping voltage-escalated charging of a reconfigurable supercapacitor array
Proceedings of the 17th IEEE/ACM international symposium on Low-power electronics and design
Balanced reconfiguration of storage banks in a hybrid electrical energy storage system
Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design
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DuraCap is a solar-powered energy harvesting system that stores harvested energy in supercapacitors and is voltage-compatible with lithium-ion batteries. The use of supercapacitors instead of batteries enables DuraCap to extend the operational life time from tens of months to tens of years. DuraCap addresses two additional problems with micro-solar systems: inefficient operation of supercapacitors during cold booting, and maximum power point tracking (MPPT) over a variety of solar panels. Our approach is to dedicate a smaller supercapacitor to cold booting before handing over to the array of larger-value supercapacitors. For MPPT, we designed a bound-control circuit for PFM regulator switching and an I-V tracer to enable self-configuring over the panel's aging process and replacement. Experimental results show the DuraCap system to achieve high conversion efficiency and minimal downtime.