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Design considerations of sub-mW indoor light energy harvesting for wireless sensor systems

Published: 18 June 2008 Publication History

Abstract

For most wireless sensor networks, one common and major bottleneck is the limited battery lifetime. The frequent maintenance efforts associated with battery replacement significantly increase the system operational and logistics cost. Unnoticed power failures on nodes will degrade the system reliability and may lead to system failure. In building management applications, to solve this problem, small energy sources such as indoor light energy are promising to provide long-term power to these distributed wireless sensor nodes. This article provides comprehensive design considerations for an indoor light energy harvesting system for building management applications. Photovoltaic cells characteristics, energy storage units, power management circuit design, and power consumption pattern of the target mote are presented. Maximum power point tracking circuits are proposed which significantly increase the power obtained from the solar cells. The novel fast charge circuit reduces the charging time. A prototype was then successfully built and tested in various indoor light conditions to discover the practical issues of the design. The evaluation results show that the proposed prototype increases the power harvested from the PV cells by 30% and also accelerates the charging rate by 34% in a typical indoor lighting condition. By entirely eliminating the rechargeable battery as energy storage, the proposed system would expect an operational lifetime 10--20 years instead of the current less than 6 months battery lifetime.

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Published In

cover image ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems
ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems  Volume 6, Issue 2
June 2010
99 pages
ISSN:1550-4832
EISSN:1550-4840
DOI:10.1145/1773814
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Accepted: 01 February 2010
Revised: 01 February 2010
Received: 01 July 2009
Published: 18 June 2008
Published in JETC Volume 6, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Design consideration
  2. PV cells wireless sensor node
  3. energy harvesting
  4. indoor light illuminance
  5. maximum power point tracking
  6. supercapacitor

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Photovoltaics for Indoor Energy HarvestingNano Energy10.1016/j.nanoen.2024.109932(109932)Online publication date: Jun-2024
  • (2023)E3DProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36108977:3(1-31)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Eternal-thing 2.0: Analog-Trojan-resilient Ripple-less Solar Harvesting System for Sustainable IoTACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems10.1145/357580019:2(1-25)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2023
  • (2023)Experimental Investigations towards the Design of Power Management System Using Indoor Photovoltaic2023 International Conference on Modeling, Simulation & Intelligent Computing (MoSICom)10.1109/MoSICom59118.2023.10458851(683-688)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2023
  • (2023)Experimental Investigations of the Thermoelectric Generator for Energy Harvester of Indoor Air Quality Sensor Node2023 IEEE 15th International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Communication Networks (CICN)10.1109/CICN59264.2023.10402206(471-476)Online publication date: 22-Dec-2023
  • (2022)Review of Applications of Energy Harvesting for Autonomous Wireless Sensor NodesEnergy Systems Design for Low-Power Computing10.4018/978-1-6684-4974-5.ch008(143-165)Online publication date: 16-Dec-2022
  • (2022)Autonomous IoT Monitoring Matching Spectral Artificial Light Manipulation for HorticultureSensors10.3390/s2211404622:11(4046)Online publication date: 26-May-2022
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  • (2022)Ambient Light Energy Harvesting and Numerical Modeling of Non-Linear PhenomenaApplied Sciences10.3390/app1204206812:4(2068)Online publication date: 16-Feb-2022
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