research-article

Design considerations of sub-mW indoor light energy harvesting for wireless sensor systems

Authors:

C. O'MathunaAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems (JETC), Volume 6, Issue 2

Article No.: 6, Pages 1 - 26

https://doi.org/10.1145/1773814.1773817

Published: 18 June 2008 Publication History

Abstract

For most wireless sensor networks, one common and major bottleneck is the limited battery lifetime. The frequent maintenance efforts associated with battery replacement significantly increase the system operational and logistics cost. Unnoticed power failures on nodes will degrade the system reliability and may lead to system failure. In building management applications, to solve this problem, small energy sources such as indoor light energy are promising to provide long-term power to these distributed wireless sensor nodes. This article provides comprehensive design considerations for an indoor light energy harvesting system for building management applications. Photovoltaic cells characteristics, energy storage units, power management circuit design, and power consumption pattern of the target mote are presented. Maximum power point tracking circuits are proposed which significantly increase the power obtained from the solar cells. The novel fast charge circuit reduces the charging time. A prototype was then successfully built and tested in various indoor light conditions to discover the practical issues of the design. The evaluation results show that the proposed prototype increases the power harvested from the PV cells by 30% and also accelerates the charging rate by 34% in a typical indoor lighting condition. By entirely eliminating the rechargeable battery as energy storage, the proposed system would expect an operational lifetime 10--20 years instead of the current less than 6 months battery lifetime.

References

[1]

Alippi, C. and Galperti, C. 2008. An adaptive system for optimal solar energy harvesting in wireless sensor network nodes. IEEE Trans. Circ. Syst. I 55, 6, 1742--1750.

[2]

Barton, J., O'Flynn, B., Bellis, S., Lynch, A., Morris, M., and O'Mathuna, S. C. 2005. A miniaturised modular platform for wireless sensor networks. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Circuit Theory and Design. 3, 35--38.

[3]

Brunelli, D., Moser, C., Thiele, L., and Benini, L. 2009. Design of a solar-harvesting circuit for batteryless embedded systems. IEEE Trans. Circ. Syst. I 56, 11, 2519--2528.

Digital Library

[4]

Chulsung, P. and Chou, P. H. 2006. AmbiMax: Autonomous energy harvesting platform for multi-supply wireless sensor nodes. In Proceedings of the 3rd Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks. 1, 168--177.

[5]

Conway, B. E., Birss, V., and Wojtowicz, J. 1998. The role and utilization of pseudocapacitance for energy storage by supercapacitors. J. Power Sources, 1-2, 1--14.

[6]

Doms, I., Merken, P., Mertens, R., and Van Hoof, C. 2009. Integrated capacitive power-management circuit for thermal harvesters with output power 10 to 1000uW. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Solid-State Circuits. 300--301.

[7]

Doyle, M., Fuller, T. F., and Newman, J. 1993. Modeling of galvonostatic charge and discharge of the lithium/polymer/insertion cell. J. Electrochem. Soc. 6, 1526--1533.

[8]

Energy Conservation Management, Inc. 2006. Green and competitive—The energy, environmental, and economic benefits of fiber glass and mineral wool insulation products. http://www.naima.org/pages/resources/library/html.

[9]

Glunz, S. W., Dicker, J., Esterle, M., Hermle, M., Isenberg, J. et al. 2002. High-Efficiency silicon solar cells for low-illumination applications. In Proceedings of the 29th IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference. 450--453.

[10]

Goetzberger, A., Hebling, C. and Schock, H. W. 2003. Photovoltaic materials, history, status and outlook. Mater. Sci. Engin.: R: Rep. 40, 1, 1--46.

[11]

Grigg, P. and Slater, A. 2004. Assessment of energy efficiency impact of building regulations compliance report. Building Research Establishment. http://www.eeph.org.uk/uploads/documents/partnership/.

[12]

Harte, S., O'Flynn, B., Martinez-Catala, R. V., and Popovici, E. M. 2007. Design and implementation of a miniaturised, low power wireless sensor node. In Proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Circuit Theory and Design. 894--897.

[13]

Hayes, M., Wang, W. S., O'Donnell, T., O'Flynn, B., and O'Mathuna, S. C. 2009. Energy harvesting for practical deployment of wireless sensor networks in building energy management (BEM) applications. In Proceedings of the NanoPower Forum. 102--105.

[14]

Hermle, M., Dicker, J., Warta, W., Glunz, S. W. and Willeke, G. 2003. Analysis of edge recombination for high-efficiency solar cells at low illumination densities. In Proceedings of the 3rd World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion. 1009--1012.

[15]

Jäger-Waldau, A. 2004. Status of thin film solar cells in research, production and the market. J. Solar Energy 77, 6, 667--678.

[16]

Jiang, X., Polastre, J., and Culler, D. 2005. Perpetual environmentally powered sensor networks. In Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks. 463--468.

Digital Library

[17]

King, A. W., Dilling, L., Zimmerman, G. P., Fairman, D. M., Houghton, R. A. et al. 2007. North American carbon budget and implications for global carbon cycle. United States DoC Online Library. www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/.

[18]

Krikke, J. 2005. Sunrise for energy harvesting products. IEEE Pervas. Comput. 4, 1, 4--5.

Digital Library

[19]

Meier, J., Spitznagel, J., Kroll, U., Bucher, C., Faÿ, S., Moriarty, T., and Shah, A. 2004. Potential of amorphous and microcrystalline silicon solar cells. J. Thin Solid Films, 451-452, 518--524.

[20]

Menzel, K., Pesch, D., O'Flynn, B., Keane, M., and O'Mathuna, C. 2008. Towards a wireless sensor platform for energy efficient building operation. J. Tsinghua Sci. Technol. 13, S1, 381--386.

[21]

Pereyma, M. 2007. Overview of the modern state of the vibration energy harvesting devices. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Perspective Technologies and Methods in MEMS Design. 107--112.

[22]

Raghunathan, V., Kansal, A., Hsu, J., Friedman, J., and Srivastava, M. 2005. Design consideration for solar energy harvesting wireless embedded systems. In Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks. 457--462.

Digital Library

[23]

Raghunathan, V., Ganeriwal, S., and Srivastava, M. 2006. Emerging techniques for long lived wireless sensor networks. IEEE Comm. Mag. 44, 4, 108--114.

Digital Library

[24]

Randall, J. F. 2005. Designing Indoor Solar Products: Photovoltaic Technologies for AES. John Wiley & Sons.

[25]

Roundy, S. Wright, P. K., and Rabaey, J. M. 2003. Energy Scavenging for Wireless Sensor Networks: With Special Focus on Vibrations. Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Digital Library

[26]

Roundy, S., Leland, E. S., Baker, J., Carleton, E., Reilly, E. et al. 2005. Improving power output for vibration-based energy scavengers. IEEE Pervas. Comput. 4,1, 28--36.

Digital Library

[27]

Shenck, N. S. and Paradiso, J. A. 2001. Energy scavenging with shoe-mounted piezoelectrics. IEEE Comput. Soc. J. Micro 21, 3, 30--42.

Digital Library

[28]

Simjee, F. I. and Chou, P. H. 2008. Efficient charging of supercapacitors for extended lifetime of wireless sensor nodes. IEEE Trans. Power Electron. 23, 3, 1526--1536.

[29]

Tarascon, J. M. and Armand, M. 2001. Issues and challenges facing rechargeable lithium batteries. Nature 414, 6861, 359--367.

[30]

Wolf, S. M. M. and Enslin, J. H. R. 1993. Economical, PV maximum power point tracking regulator with simplistic controller. In Proceedings of the Power Electronics Specialists Conference. 581--587.

Cited By

Yamin NBhat G(2024)Indoor–Outdoor Energy Management for Wearable IoT Devices With Conformal Prediction and RolloutIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2024.344838243:11(3370-3381)Online publication date: Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2024.3448382
Chakraborty ALucarelli GXu JSkafi ZCastro-Hermosa SKaveramma ABalakrishna RBrown T(2024)Photovoltaics for Indoor Energy HarvestingNano Energy10.1016/j.nanoen.2024.109932(109932)Online publication date: Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nanoen.2024.109932
Arabi AWang XZhang YKim J(2023)E3DProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36108977:3(1-31)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610897
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Design considerations of sub-mW indoor light energy harvesting for wireless sensor systems

Recommendations

Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks (EH-WSNs): A Review

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are crucial in supporting continuous environmental monitoring, where sensor nodes are deployed and must remain operational to collect and transfer data from the environment to a base-station. However, sensor nodes have ...
Energy harvesting by sweeping voltage-escalated charging of a reconfigurable supercapacitor array
ISLPED '11: Proceedings of the 17th IEEE/ACM international symposium on Low-power electronics and design

EscaCap is an energy harvester that uses a boost-up charge pump to perform maximum power-transfer tracking (MPTT) while charging a reservoir supercapacitor array (RSA) with a reconfigurable topology. Unlike buck-down type harvesters, the voltage-...
Operation strategy for energy harvesting wireless sensor networks
IMCOM '15: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication

Over the past few years wireless sensor networks applications have evolved from a stage where these networks were designed in a technology-dependent manner to a stage where some conceptual understanding issues now exist. As wireless sensor networks are ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems

ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems Volume 6, Issue 2

June 2010

99 pages

ISSN:1550-4832

EISSN:1550-4840

DOI:10.1145/1773814

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Journal Family

ACM Journals for the Design of Smart and Connected Systems

Publication History

Accepted: 01 February 2010

Revised: 01 February 2010

Received: 01 July 2009

Published: 18 June 2008

Published in JETC Volume 6, Issue 2

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed

Funding Sources

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

68
Total Citations
View Citations
1,478
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)36
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)6

Reflects downloads up to 21 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Yamin NBhat G(2024)Indoor–Outdoor Energy Management for Wearable IoT Devices With Conformal Prediction and RolloutIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2024.344838243:11(3370-3381)Online publication date: Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2024.3448382
Chakraborty ALucarelli GXu JSkafi ZCastro-Hermosa SKaveramma ABalakrishna RBrown T(2024)Photovoltaics for Indoor Energy HarvestingNano Energy10.1016/j.nanoen.2024.109932(109932)Online publication date: Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nanoen.2024.109932
Arabi AWang XZhang YKim J(2023)E3DProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36108977:3(1-31)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610897
Ram SSahoo SDas BMahapatra KMohanty S(2023)Eternal-thing 2.0: Analog-Trojan-resilient Ripple-less Solar Harvesting System for Sustainable IoTACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems10.1145/357580019:2(1-25)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3575800
George AKurian CKulkarni SK N VGeorge V(2023)Experimental Investigations towards the Design of Power Management System Using Indoor Photovoltaic2023 International Conference on Modeling, Simulation & Intelligent Computing (MoSICom)10.1109/MoSICom59118.2023.10458851(683-688)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/MoSICom59118.2023.10458851
Dwi Kuncoro CEfendi ASakanti MHikmah A(2023)Experimental Investigations of the Thermoelectric Generator for Energy Harvester of Indoor Air Quality Sensor Node2023 IEEE 15th International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Communication Networks (CICN)10.1109/CICN59264.2023.10402206(471-476)Online publication date: 22-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CICN59264.2023.10402206
Puthran WPrasad SGatti R(2022)Review of Applications of Energy Harvesting for Autonomous Wireless Sensor NodesEnergy Systems Design for Low-Power Computing10.4018/978-1-6684-4974-5.ch008(143-165)Online publication date: 16-Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-4974-5.ch008
Cappelli IFort APozzebon ATani MTrivellin NVignoli VBruzzi M(2022)Autonomous IoT Monitoring Matching Spectral Artificial Light Manipulation for HorticultureSensors10.3390/s2211404622:11(4046)Online publication date: 26-May-2022
https://doi.org/10.3390/s22114046
Ji YWang WZheng MChen S(2022)Real Time Building Evacuation Modeling with an Improved Cellular Automata Method and Corresponding IoT System ImplementationBuildings10.3390/buildings1206071812:6(718)Online publication date: 26-May-2022
https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings12060718
Jabbar HJeong T(2022)Ambient Light Energy Harvesting and Numerical Modeling of Non-Linear PhenomenaApplied Sciences10.3390/app1204206812:4(2068)Online publication date: 16-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.3390/app12042068
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents