Self-startup soil energy harvesting system with a quick startup circuit

摘要

This study presents a self-sustainable soil energy harvesting system with a rapid startup circuit. The proposed system enables the operation from input voltage as low as 0.3 V, and to up-convert the output to 3.3 V. The system is capable of extracting maximum power from the soil energy source. An efficient startup circuit that performs low initial charging time for a supercapacitor is presented. Experimental results show that the proposed system has a peak end-to-end efficiency of 58.48%. Also, the initial charging time of the supercapacitor is lowered by 2.54x as compared to the design without the startup circuit. The proposed system has been verified with off-the-shelf components.