1st Edition
Handbook of Energy Harvesting Power Supplies and Applications
This book describes the fundamentals and principles of energy harvesting and provides the necessary theory and background to develop energy harvesting power supplies. It explains the overall system design and gives quantitative assumptions on environmental energy. It explains different system blocks for an energy harvesting power supply and the trade-offs. The text covers in detail different energy transducer technologies such as piezoelectric, electrodynamic, and thermoelectric generators and solar cells from the material to the component level and explains the appropriate power management circuits required in these systems. Furthermore, it describes and compares storage elements such as secondary batteries and supercapacitors to select the most appropriate one for the application. Besides power supplies that use ambient energy, the book presents systems that use electromagnetic fields in the radio frequency range. Finally, it discusses different application fields and presents examples of self-powered electronic systems to illustrate the content of the preceding chapters.
Introduction
System Design
Input Energy
Piezo-electric Transducers
Electro-dynamic Transducers
Electro-static Transducers
Thermo-Generators
Solar-Cells
Fuel Cells
Power Management
Radio Frequency Transmission
Batteries
Capacitors
Applications
Summary
Biography
Peter Spies studied electrical engineering at the University of Erlangen, Germany, and graduated with a Dipl-Ing degree in 1997. In 2010, he finished his PhD thesis on power saving in mobile communication devices. Since 1998, he has been working in the Power Efficient Systems Department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (Fraunhofer IIS), Germany. Since 2001, he is group manager of the Integrated Energy Supplies Group, where he is involved in the research and design of power and battery management and energy harvesting. Dr. Spies’ group focuses on integrated circuit and system design as well as software development, with wireless sensor networks and hybrid and electrical vehicles as the most important applications.
Loreto Mateu obtained her BS in industrial engineering in 1999, MS in electronic engineering in 2002, and PhD in 2009 with a thesis titled "Energy Harvesting from Human Passive Power" from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain. In June 2007, she joined the Power Efficient Systems Department at Fraunhofer IIS as a research engineer. Since 2012, she is chief scientist of the Power Efficient Systems Department at Fraunhofer IIS. Her research interests include AC-DC and DC-DC converters as well as electrical modeling for energy harvesting applications.
Markus Pollak studied electrical engineering at the University of Erlangen and graduated with a Dipl‐Ing degree in 2000. Since February 2001, he is working at the Power Efficient Systems Department of Fraunhofer IIS. He is involved in the design of integrated circuits for RF transceivers and power management circuits. His recent projects are concerned with DC–DC converters for energy harvesting applications and programming of microcontrollers for wireless transceivers.
"This is an ideal book for those wanting to learn more about wireless energy harvesting in general. Its main focus is on power supply design for energy harvesting applications of wireless sensors. It contains a wealth of information that can be used to design energy harvesting circuits and to create ideas for new circuit topologies."
—IEEE Electrical Insulation Magazine
