Energy Conversion and Management Circuit of Hybrid Energy Harvesting for Vibrations and Temperature Differences

摘要

Harvesting environmental energy and converting it into electrical energy are of important significance for self-powered and low-powered wireless sensor nodes (WSNs), but a single energy source tends to have some shortcomings. So it is much necessary to study hybrid energy harvesting technologies. Vibrations and temperature differences are two common environmental energies, but they have different electrical characteristics of energy conversion. Therefore, how to achieve the maximum conversion efficiency simultaneously is a key problem in engineering applications. This paper presents a hybrid energy harvesting architecture for vibrations and temperature differences. An efficient energy conversion and management circuit is designed in detail, mainly including energy conversion circuit and energy management circuit. In the end simulations and experiments are carried out and the results show that the proposed circuit can harvest vibration and temperature difference energy efficiently simultaneously, and meet the power consumption requirement of a WSN.