AN INVESTIGATION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF SOLAR-THERMAL BASED HYBRID ENERGY HARVESTING SYSTEM FOR WSN

Various energy harvesting techniques e.g. solar, thermal, wind, etc. are the auxiliary solutions to the depleted battery of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) Nodes. Hybrid Energy Harvesting (HEH) is the technique to harvest energy from more than one renewable/non-renewable energy sources. In this paper, a thermal and solar energy source based hybrid energy harvesting system has been deeply investigated and implemented to test the feasibility of providing perpetual life time to the sensor node. A mechanical and electrical schematic has been proposed for the HEH system. This is noticed that at day time the energy from the solar light is dominating while at night time thermoelectric energy harvester can provide energy. In the results from thermal modeling, it is found that for a load of 5Ω, maximum power is generated and an increase in ΔT increases the generated energy exponentially and the results drawn from the solar modeling show that increasing the solar irradiance (G) increases the output power. The capacitor gets fully charged in 15minutes (approx.) and the battery gets fully charged in 3hours (approx.).