Background

A wide range of energy harvesting methods have been explored to harvest various ambient sources such as thermal, solar and vibration energy. However, individual ambient energy sources have limits on power and availability and many existing power management solutions extract and convert energy with very low efficiency in real-world applications. The demands of end user applications often exceed the energy harvested, resulting in a mismatch between power generation and consumption. To overcome this high efficiency multi‑source harvesting systems are required with power management circuits that consume as little energy as possible.

Technology Overview

This technology consists of an efficient and adaptive multi‑source power management and storage circuit, , optimising energy capture at the maximum power point of the individual energy harvesting devices. The circuit transfers energy from multiple energy harvesters of various types either resistive or non‑resistive via a single DC‑DC converter and energy storage device to the end user application. Using only one DC‑DC converter for multiple sources reduces the overall power consumption of the circuit and enables switching between sources to optimise efficiency.

Further details can be found at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8110681

Benefits

The key benefits of the technology are:

Reduced power consumption
Ability to switch between multiple energy harvesting sources to maximise power generation

Applications

Key applications for the technology are:

Energy generation for remote and distributed sensor networks
Power management for Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices

Opportunity

The University is seeking potential partnerships with a view to developing research collaborations or commercial licensing opportunities.

Multi-source Energy Harvesting

Patents

IP Status

Seeking