Medlay: A Reconfigurable Micro-Power Management to Investigate Self-Powered Systems

Abstract

In self-powered microsystems, a power management is essential to extract, transfer and regulate power from energy harvesting sources to loads such as sensors. The challenge is to consider all of the different structures and components available and build the optimal power management on a microscale. The purpose of this paper is to streamline the design process by creating a novel reconfigurable testbed called Medlay. First, we propose a uniform interface for management functions e.g., power conversion, energy storing and power routing. This interface results in a clear layout because power and status pins are strictly separated, and inputs and outputs have fixed positions. Medlay is the ready-to-use and open-hardware platform based on the interface. It consists of a base board and small modules incorporating e.g., dc-dc converters, power switches and supercapacitors. Measurements confirm that Medlay represents a system on one circuit board, as parasitic effects of the interconnections are negligible. The versatility regarding different setups on the testbed is determined to over 250,000 combinations by layout graph grammar. Lastly, we underline the applicability by recreating three state-of-the-art systems with the testbed. In conclusion, Medlay facilitates building and testing power management in a very compact, clear and extensible fashion.

Design and Testing of a Kinetic Energy Harvester Embedded Into an Oceanic Drifter

“…Toh et al designed in [21] a system to follow the MPP of an electrical generator by controlling the duty cycle of a boost converter, who delivers power to a dc-link, and a flyback converter to adjust the voltage level at the load. From then, many conversion systems have been developed depending on the energy source; a summary is presented in [22]. On the other hand, the ESE can be a regular capacitor, a supercapacitor, a rechargeable battery, or even an hybrid system [23].…”

Design and development of a kinetic energy harvester device for oceanic drifter applications

“…Toh et al designed in [24] a system to follow the maximum power point (MPP) of a micro generator by controlling the duty cycle of a boost converter who gives the power to a dc-link and a flyback converter to adequate the voltage level at the load. From then, many conversion systems have been developed depending on the energy source and [25] presents a summary. These ultralow PMU follow the MPP of the energy transducer and transfer the energy to a storage device, which tend to be a Li-ion battery, a super capacitor, or a hybrid storage system [26].…”

Behavioral Modeling of DC/DC Converters in Self-Powered Sensor Systems with Modelica

“…Designers of self-powered systems typically prefer commercially off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions due to cost, the availability of evaluation boards and fast board bring-up. There are several popular PMICs (currently around 20) for energy-harvesting WSNs that have an impact on system design, as overviews in [ 6 , 10 ] show.…”

“…Our research is focused on long-term experiments and energy balance modeling of self-powered wireless sensor systems [ 5 ]. We consider the DC/DC converters to be self-contained building blocks in which detailed short-term effects are already captured by a proper circuit design [ 6 ].…”