Multisource energy harvesting circuit for low power application

Abstract

Energy Harvesting (EH) research has provided a promising solution to overcome the limitation of battery and the short lifetime of electronics devices. Recently this technology has proposed a multi-input source to increase the efficiency of the technology by exploiting the ambient energy from mechanical vibration, light, and thermal gradient. This paper presents the simulation, design, fabrication, and testing of double layer multisource energy harvesting circuit. This will be of benefit to designer and researcher of future EH technologies implementation. The power management circuits that are used for comparison are, power management circuits LTC 3588-1, LTC 3588-2 and voltage doubler, which have the ability to harvest energy from the surrounding. Simulation and experimental tests were conducted in order to compare the power management circuits. The final result shows that the recommended power management circuit for low power energy harvesting power management is the LTC3588-1 for low voltage generated by the PZT, both LTC3588 circuits and the voltage double can be used together for low power energy harvesting but require higher capacitor to stabilize the output of voltage doubler and when all the multiple input source are present, the passive switching will choose the higher available voltage from the circuit. © 2018 Author(s).