Energy Harvesting, Storage, and Management
There are many growing challenges facing system designers to deliver the new, clean, efficient, powerful, and versatile solutions that the world demands. Society wants faster, stronger, and more reliable ways to travel, work, communicate, monitor, and interact with their world. To meet the growing needs of consumers, creative innovation is the best response to fulfill the objectives of the future.
Over the last several decades, engineers and researchers have worked tirelessly to design an energy storage system featuring the energy rich performance of a battery and the power rich performance of a supercapacitor in a lightweight, space efficient, and tradeoff-free package. They are now in luck. With Capacitech’s wire-shaped supercapacitor, the Cable-Based Capacitor (CBC), designers can integrate supercapacitors into their energy storage system in ways they never could be before.
Technological advances are roaring at the speed of light. Companies must continue to improve design of their products and offer new capabilities. With pressure to make products smaller and better looking, while adding new features, finding space for an energy storage system that meets the needs of the product is becoming difficult. Energy storage progress is slow compared to that of semiconductors. As such, components like batteries and supercapacitors tend to be massive compared to the rest of the electronics. One reason for this is because traditional energy storage products are rigid, inflexible components that have a limited number of placement options.
What if we could form the products in a way that we could install energy storage capabilities somewhere else? Could the energy storage component be a part of the product or system’s infrastructure? Capacitech’s flexible and wire-like supercapacitor makes this possible, being designed for off-circuit board applications, such as inside a wiring harness or into a wearable.
Applications that need of an innovative approach at energy/power management:
- Smart Home devices
- Agriculture remote monitoring
- Transportation & Industrial industries
- Wearables
Limitations of Energy Harvesting
Unique problems required unique solutions. There are many industries where reliable power sources are unavailable. The rapidly emerging world of IoT is one of those industries. As it currently stands, batteries do not last the life of a sensor. This means that you either let the battery determine the life of a sensor used in IoT devices or create a strategy for regularly replacing batteries. Technicians can expect to spend 20% of their time changing batteries. This is too expensive of a problem for the end user to look the other way and not focus on solving. The technology being developed in our world to counter this issue is referred to as energy harvesting, which are practices to capture energy from ambient sources to power devices. For example, humidity and temperature sensors on a farm can use solar or wind power as a energy source instead of a battery. In other instances, such as wearables, the kinetic energy of the wearer can be used.
Solar cells are very popular energy harvesting devices, but when used alone there is a problem… In most regions, even in the sunshine state of Florida, the sun is blocked at least 2/3 of the time, preventing energy from being absorbed. Even if the sun is shining, the energy harvested is only enough to power a sensor or a small circuit, but is too little energy to send that information somewhere useful through wireless means such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or cellular networks. A technician would need to manually retrieve the data where it was collected, an unacceptable standard in the 21st century, the age of information and IoT.
If the goal is to remove batteries due to their short service life, then which type of energy storage components can be used in its place that doesn’t require frequent and costly replacements? A long service life energy storage component is needed that can also provide the peak-power needed to send that data wirelessly. Supercapacitors are the best solution. The ability to store energy is paramount for IoT applications. It can increase the lifetime of a system and reduce maintenance, saving end users money. We are seeing a rapidly growing trend of using solar cells with supercapacitors to enable high power, battery free, IoT devices.
Role of Energy Management
To leverage energy harvesting and supercapacitor technologies efficiently, power management integrated circuits (PMIC) are used. A PMIC is used to control the flow of energy and power from the energy harvester, to the supercapacitor, and to the electronic device (load). The PMIC is very important given that each of these components operate at a different voltage. The PMIC manages charging and sleep modes, DC-to-DC conversion, scaling of voltages down or up, among others.
There are some key considerations to make when designing the circuit based on the application requirements. The one main concept designers should use is to accumulate over time the trickle of tiny, sporadic energy from the source (energy harvester), store it (supercapacitor), and then release it as a power pulse when needed by the system (sensors and communication circuits in the IoT device). The diagram below is an example of that design process:
An ideal product for battery-less wireless sensor nodes that monitor physical and environmental conditions such as smart homes, commercial buildings, factories, infrastructure, and agriculture could be a PMIC from Infineon Cypress S6AE101A. Here is a simplified diagram for one of their low power devices:
In these designs, supercapacitors are commonly used as a device to store energy. The supercapacitor, or bank of supercapacitors, is restricted to use on a circuit board, which makes the product larger, limiting where it can be used. When trying to limit to the size of a product, integrating Capacitech Energy’s wire-like supercapacitor, the CBC, helps the designer overcome these sacrifices so they can add supercapacitors without increasing the size of their product. This ultimately adds value to the end user by way of either smaller IoT devices or IoT devices with new features (added inside the space saved on the circuit board from the CBC), not to mention that the device is now battery free to reduce their cost of ownership.
The CBC opens options for where energy storage can be installed, helping designers create products that meet their customers’ needs. Pairing supercapacitors with energy harvesting devices, which can be controlled by a power management integrated circuit could be the match made in heaven for engineers building systems to better our evolving lives. This energy-harvesting innovation makes it possible to overcome the challenges of ambient light after coming out of a prolonged state with little or no light energy available. There will be enough power available to perform system boots, and signal transmissions. Combining all this together can increase the lifetime of a system while reducing maintenance to save the end users money.
A Bright, Better Future with Flexible Supercapacitors
As we drive today’s SmartCities in our electric vehicles, receiving detailed GPS directions from our smartphone, that is connected to battery free IoT devices telling us information life if our front door is locked. The future we once imagined is becoming a reality. As CBCs are integrated into more and more systems, the opportunities for innovation only grow. Expanding the use of Capacitech’s cable-based capacitor solution will revolutionize the efficient ways we handle energy management in our world.
Capacitech Energy, a cutting-edge company in Orlando, is integrating supercapacitors with a product or system’s existing infrastructure. Our unprecedented technology extends the possibilities for emerging design innovations. This cutting-edge innovation offers many aesthetic and space saving advantages compared to existing supercapacitors on the market. Energy harvesting options have never been so flexible as today thanks to Capacitech’s ability to answer the call for new supercapacitor technology.
