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A Wide Input Power Line Energy Harvesting Circuit For Wireless Sensor Nodes

Massive deployment of wireless IoT (Internet of Things) devices makes replacement or recharge of batteries expensive and impractical for some applications. Energy harvesting is a promising solution, and various designs are proposed to harvest power from ambient resources including thermal, vibrational, solar, wind, and RF sources. Among these ambient resources, AC powerlines are a stable energy source in an urban environment. Many researchers investigated methods to exploit this stable source of energy to power wireless IoT devices.

The proposed circuit aims to harvest energy from AC powerlines with a wide input range of from 10 to 50 A. The proposed system includes a wake-up circuit and is capable of cold-start. A buck-boost converter operating in DCM is adopted for impedance matching, where the impedance is rather independent of the operation conditions. So, the proposed system can be applied to various types of wireless sensor nodes with different internal impedances. Experimental results show that the proposed system achieves an efficiency of 80.99% under the powerline current of 50 A. / M.S. / Nowadays, with the magnificent growth of IoT devices, a reliable, and efficient energy supply system becomes more and more important, because, for some applications, battery replacement is very expensive and sometimes even impossible. At this time, a well-designed self-contained energy harvesting system is a good solution. The energy harvesting system can extend the service life of the IoT devices and reduce the frequency of charging or checking the device.

In this work, the proposed circuit aims to harvest energy from the AC power lines, and the harvested power intends to power wireless sensor nodes (WSNs). By utilizing the efficient and self-contained EH system, WSNs can be used to monitor the temperature, pressure, noise level and humidity etc.

The proposed energy harvesting circuit was implemented with discrete components on a printed circuit board (PCB). Under a power line current of 50 A @ 50 Hz, the proposed energy harvesting circuit can harvest 156.6 mW, with a peak efficiency of 80.99 %.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/103426
Date January 2021
CreatorsWang, Jinhua
ContributorsElectrical and Computer Engineering, Dong, Sam Ha, Yi, Yang, Jia, Xiaoting
PublisherVirginia Tech
Source SetsVirginia Tech Theses and Dissertation
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
FormatETD, application/pdf, application/pdf
RightsCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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