Tech Briefs Magazine - October 2021 - ST-6

Energy Harvesting
integration - is linked to IoT applications
through enabling technologies.
Stakeholders such as suppliers, developers,
users, and integrators, need to
closely cooperate in component selection,
device and system specification,
redundancy, reliability, configurability,
data processing needs, and various
other application considerations, in
order to optimize these systems.
Standardization and interoperability
with supporting simulation tools operating
at device-level and system-level are
also critical enablers underpinning this
ecosystem.
IoT System Benefits of EH
Figure 3. Credit card sized PV self-powered temperature, light, and humidity wireless sensor developed
by Tyndall needs just eight hours of indoor light per day and can operate for 72 hours in darkness.
(Courtesy of Tyndall National Institute)
of research community-driven efforts to
resolve this is the MISCHIEF platform
being developed by Tyndall National
Institute (Cork, Ireland). MISCHIEF is
an innovative high efficiency, low quiescent
current PMIC capable of handling
an unprecedented range of ambient
energies particularly in the sub 10 μW
domain that heretofore were unusable.
It is modular and highly configurable so
that it is easy to add new circuit blocks
and/or adjust set point ranges. It also
has a digital interface enabling it to
interact with other components to
dynamically adjust their operation mode
(sleep, standby, sense, transmit,
process). This minimizes their power
consumption while meeting the application
needs.
Energy storage is critical for intermittent
energy sources, since it provides a
buffer to handle peak demand, so the
upstream power source only has to provide
for the system steady state needs
instead of worst-case, peak power
demands.
Creating an EH Ecosystem
Contributors to the Power IoT and
EH communities - developers, manufacturers
of materials and devices, as
well as installers, integrators, and end
users - have tended to work in siloed
environments. However, for EH to successfully
have major penetration into
6
Cov
mainstream applications, EH transducer
folks will have to work closely with
power management and energy storage
folks, let alone with the many other lowpower
system component providers and
end-users. This is particularly true for
many of the sensor network, low power
type applications this article focuses on.
In the Power Sources Manufacturers
Association (PSMA) Energy Harvesting
Committee (EHC), we are working to
establish a coordinated ecosystem to
address these gaps. This approach started
with gathering stakeholders and providing
educational resources such as
webinars and industry events such as
the Applied Power Electronics Con -
ference (APEC), and now a dedicated
biennial event, EnerHarv.
Since the
EHC is composed of many members of
both the IEEE Power Electronics
Society (PELS) and PSMA organizations
it is ideally suited to tackle these
multidimensional challenges. Led by
Thomas Becker of Thobecore and
Michalis Kiziroglou of Imperial College
London, the PSMA EHC also has
recently published informative white
papers on their website.
Figure 4 is an illustration of the
" ecosystem " needed to coordinate the
separate elements of an EH powered
IoT. A central core of scientific disciplines
- energy harvesting, storage,
micropower management and system
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The financial benefits of EH go far
beyond the first-order analyses of comparing
Bill of Material costs. Although,
operating expenses are obviously
reduced by using energy harvesting,
savings in capital expenses might not be
so obvious. If energy demand is
reduced at the edge, where energy has
the highest supply cost, then there is a
rippling effect all the way upstream to
the power plant. Every step in the
power chain tends to add safety margins
to designs, so after many system
levels of critical energy storage, and
utility distribution, there is an incredible
amount of added " fat " . This unnecessarily
increases both capital and operating
expenses.
While mainly considered for high
bandwidth, low latency applications,
emerging 5G technology and related
infrastructure, if harnessed correctly
can play a major role in creating savings
for low power, low data rate transfer
applications. The greatly increased
number of access points that will
become available with the deployment
of 5G makes for a unique opportunity to
address energy efficiency optimization
from the highest to the lowest levels.
For instance, the standard governing
what we call " 5G " supports a feature
called " discontinuous transmission
(DTx) " for dropping data packets to
save energy in the microsecond time
frame. This will enable small-cell power
management techniques and grid-scale
energy storage to work in conjunction
with energy management systems
installed in all manner of sources, such
as power plants and various distributed
energy resources, and loads, such as
local grid blocks, houses/buildings, to
save energy in the seconds to minutes
time frames and beyond.
Sensor Technology, October 2021

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Tech Briefs Magazine - October 2021

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