Today, energy harvesting is drawing a great deal of attention due to modern trends in energy saving and sustainable development purposes. Among renewable energy sources fuel cells and photovoltaic arrays are the most promising for a wide variety of applications, ranging from few mWatts of wireless sensor networks to kWatts for household appliances. Coupling several harvesters and renewable sources is the winning strategy to ensure a proper supply overcoming the uncertainty and limited availability of common harvesters and renewable sources. Multisource energy harvesting is actually an open research topic involving several pressing and often conflicting requirements. System cost, complexity, size and efficiency are only a few performance indicators. In this paper, a multi-input, singleinductor architecture is proposed. A practical implementation is proposed as an example. Benefits brought by the proposed architecture over existing solutions are widely investigated. Design guidelines are given and simulation results are presented to test the efficiency of the proposed architecture.
In this paper a multisource renewable energy system simultaneously fed by photovoltaic and thermo-electric generators is proposed. The designed system provides a multiinput power converter which is properly controlled to achieve both output and input control. The output DC bus is regulated to achieve a proper supply of the output energy buffer. On each input port of the power converter a control on the source operating point is applied to achieve he maximum power transfer from each renewable source. Experimental results are shown to test the efficiency of the proposed solution.
In this paper, a novel multi-input, single inductor architecture is proposed. An innovative hysteretic control strategy of both the output voltage and the sources operating point control is designed and tested. Benefits brought by the proposed architecture over existing solutions are widely investigated. As an example, the design of a 48 V dual input system which is fed by photo voltaic and thermo-electric generators is proposed. Design guidelines are given and simulation results are presented to test the efficiency of the proposed architecture.
In this paper a measurement system for a pedalassist rickshaw is described. It has been designed and realized with the purpose of a deep analysis of operating time, range and general performance of the prototype vehicle. The three-wheel velocipede under test, developed in the SDES laboratory of the University of Palermo, is equipped with two battery packs, and a photovoltaic panel which is used to recharge one of the packs at a time. To further improve the autonomy of this mean, a fuel cell will be added as a power source, whose consequent improvement in performance could be easily investigated by the presented measurement setup. An Arduino board has been employed to receive and store all collected data into a microSD card, allowing a convenient accessibility of all gathered information
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