Design and Experimental Evaluation on an Advanced Multisource Energy Harvesting System for Wireless Sensor Nodes

Abstract

An effective multisource energy harvesting system is presented as power supply for wireless sensor nodes (WSNs). The advanced system contains not only an expandable power management module including control of the charging and discharging process of the lithium polymer battery but also an energy harvesting system using the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) circuit with analog driving scheme for the collection of both solar and vibration energy sources. Since the MPPT and the power management module are utilized, the system is able to effectively achieve a low power consumption. Furthermore, a super capacitor is integrated in the system so that current fluctuations of the lithium polymer battery during the charging and discharging processes can be properly reduced. In addition, through a simple analog switch circuit with low power consumption, the proposed system can successfully switch the power supply path according to the ambient energy sources and load power automatically. A practical WSNs platform shows that efficiency of the energy harvesting system can reach about 75–85% through the 24-hour environmental test, which confirms that the proposed system can be used as a long-term continuous power supply for WSNs.