C2.1 - Energy Harvesting - Power Supplies Without Batteries or Cables
- Event
- SENSOR+TEST Conferences 2011
2011-06-07 - 2011-06-09
Nürnberg - Band
- Proceedings SENSOR 2011
- Chapter
- C2 - Energy Harvesting
- Author(s)
- P. Spies - Fraunhofer Institut – IIS, Nürnberg (Germany)
- Pages
- 386 - 390
- DOI
- 10.5162/sensor11/c2.1
- ISBN
- 978-3-9810993-9-3
- Price
- free
Abstract
Energy Harvesting makes use of minimum amounts of ambient energy like thermal gradients, vibrations or light. Collecting these amounts of energy a long time to power short actions like sensor measurements or data transmission is the key of energy harvesting.
A lot of research and development activities are on-going world-wide. Promising field trials are carried out in various application areas, most of them in them in wireless sensor networks. First products are available, mainly in niche markets with the consumer area predicted for the next ten years.
The characterization of potential ambient energy source shows a great variety of properties and thus great challenges of the system design. Different development approaches are possible to arrive at a cost-optimized power supply solution.
Generic energy harvesting systems are composed of an energy transducer, a power management, some kind of energy storage and the final application. Matching of the different functional blocks will result in maximum energy output and thus minimum device cost and board space.