Energy Harvesting
There is currently a need for power sources that can replace batteries in various types of environments and applications. For example, wireless sensor networks consisting of several nodes for gas and chemical sensors, temperature, pressure and humidity monitoring, motion detectors, structural health monitoring, and explosives detection are now commonplace.
In addition, sensors located at inaccessible and remote areas can also benefit from on-board perpetual power sources that leverage energy from naturally occurring and man-made sources. The advancement in the CMOS-technology, IC manufacturing, and networking techniques as well as the potentially low duty cycle sensor nodes, have brought down the total power requirements of wireless sensors to fewhundredmicrowatts Availability of cost effective energy source that can generate, store, and deliver power using natural as well as traditional sources has very broad application potential in wide ranging segments as shown in Figure below.
TMP’s mission is to develop materials, devices, circuits for energy harvesting (EH) and related enabling system technologies as commercial products and solutions that will harvest energy from naturally-available sources such as human energy, wind, vibrations and solar into micro-power transferred ideally into battery-free, isolated and remote electronic devices such as wireless sensors, medical implants or further complement traditional storage for portable electronics. Figure below shows the three key EH components (EH transducers, intelligent power management, and energy storage), and potential applications.
TMP is focusing on developing such EH systems for powering remote sensors especially in hazardous and inaccessible environments. The input transducer converts energy from light, wind, and thermal gradients. These sources can all provide a high efficiency and low maintenance power source, particularly at a small scale, either in standalone or in concert with other traditional generation and storage sources. However, efficient transducer and power management designs have not been sufficiently exploited due to material, available total power efficiency, and system implementation limitations. TMP is pursuing broader technical and commercialization vision of efficient and cost effective generation, management and delivery of sufficient remote power with device and system configurations that are cost effective for manufacturability and flexible for broader deployment, key limitations to date for large scale use.