Title: Efficient power management for wireless sensor node with wind energy harvesting

Authors: Yin Wu; Wenbo Liu

Addresses: College of Automation Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China ' College of Automation Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China

Abstract: Energy harvesting has emerged as an innovative way to keep low-power wireless sensor network running independently for years or even decades. This paper presents an optimised wind energy harvesting system which uses a specially designed ultra low power management for sustaining the operation of a wireless sensor node. The proposed system includes maximum power point tracking (MPPT) circuits, buck-boost converter, energy storage element, buck converter and wireless sensor node. It harvests energy from the wind by imposing the harvester to work close to its maximum power point and supply power to the wireless sensor node. In this paper we analyse the dynamics of the power losses of DC-DC converters while the wireless sensor node works under dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) scheme. And we propose a DCOPM (DC-dc Converter-aware Optimal Power Management) technique which aims at achieving optimal system performance under energy harvesting constraints. Experiment result shows that our system could work at its maximum efficiency with self-autonomous and achieves better survivability than the existing research.

Keywords: DC-DC converters; dynamic voltage scaling; maximum power point tracking; wind energy harvesting; energy management; wireless sensor nodes; energy efficiency; wind power; low-power WSNs; wireless sensor networks; power loss dynamics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2012.051528

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2012 Vol.12 No.4, pp.223 - 231

Received: 13 May 2012
Accepted: 13 Oct 2012
Published online: 20 Jan 2013 *

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