A multi-input, single-inductor power system for multisource energy harvesting

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, single-inductor 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.