Power Management Circuit for Wireless Sensor Nodes Powered by Energy Harvesting: On the Synergy of Harvester and Load

Abstract

This paper presents an adaptive power management circuit which maximizes the energy transfer from the energy harvester to wireless sensor nodes in real world applications. Low power consumption techniques were adopted in the power management circuit to maximize the delivery of the harvested energy to the load instead of being consumed by the circuit. The presented circuit incorporates an analogue control circuit (ACC) for maximum power transfer from the energy harvester to the storage capacitor and an energy-aware interface (EAI) for controlling the energy flow from the storage capacitor to the load. To evaluate the performance of the presented circuit, piezoelectric energy harvesting was used as a studied case. The piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) was mechanically excited at different strain loadings and frequencies. The experimental results show the circuit can self-start and powered directly by the PEH since the EAI and ACC have low power consumption in the range of micorwatts. The circuit is adaptive to energy harvesters of varying output and various electrical loads, with a peak efficiency of 76.18% in transferring the harvested energy from the PEH to the storage capacitor. More than 96% of the energy released from the storage capacitor is effectively transferred to the electrical load.