Efficient power management circuit for biomass-based energy harvesting system

摘要

This paper presents an efficient power management circuit (PMC) for microbial fuel cells (MFCs). The proposed PMC has been designed with off-the-shelf components including a charge pump, a supercapacitor, and two boost converters. Both the charge pump and one of the boost converter are directly connected to the MFC, that is, connected in parallel to the MFC. The reason for that using the charge pump can extend the variety of PMC input power, and deploying the boost converter can extract more power from the MFC. Thus, the proposed PMC can test the input power range from 11.25 mu W to 1.6 mW. Also, the proposed PMC can extract 6x higher power from the MFC as compared with the charge pump alone. A wide dynamic load range from 10.89 mu W to 108.9 mW can be supported by the proposed PMC. Measured results show that the interval to provide power supply to the load by the proposed PMC is 9.2x shorter than that achieved by the charge pump alone. Also, the proposed PMC enhances the end-to-end efficiency by range from 10x to 14.35x with varying loads. The proposed PMC achieves the end-to-end peak efficiency of 73.185%. The proposed PMC can achieve a low charging time, a wide dynamic load range, and a regulated output voltage compared with prior works.