Desenvolvimento de um circuito somador de energia para sistemas de colheita híbrida de energia

Abstract

In recent years, the development of electronic devices with low or ultra-low power consumption made it possible to use low-capacity batteries and the use of energy sources available in the environment, such as solar, thermal, RF, among others, to feed them, wich made possible even the independence of the use of batteries. This energy exploitation and the conditioning to feed electronic devices are termed Energy Harvesting. Nowadays, in order to optimize the performance of energy harvesting systems, hybrid systems are being studied and developed, that is, they use more than one energy source, thus increasing the quantity and availability of energy supplied. A fundamental element in the development of hybrid energy harvesting systems is the one that receives energy from different sources and performs the right combination for a single output. In general, the power combination circuits are timeshared, i.e., only one source is connected to the load while the others are in the standby state or accumulating energy. At present, some studies are aimed at the development of combination circuits that take advantage of the available energy sources simultaneously, called in this work, energy adder circuits. In this context, the objective of this work is the study and development of an energy adder circuit for hybrid energy harvesting systems capable of harvesting, conditioning and adding energy from different sources of the environment. For this, Linear Technology's ultralow consumption integrated circuits were used for the conditioning and a energy adder circuit is proposed. The preliminary experimental results show the performance obtained with the designed and developed system. Additionally, it is shown that the developed circuit is capable of being adapted for different energy sources according to the availability of the environment in question.