Power management for thermal energy harvesting in aircrafts

Energy harvesting for wireless sensors and sensor networks becomes more and more popular in recent years. Many different energy scavengers have been discussed; however their deployment depends strongly on the environmental conditions. This paper describes the system development for using thermal energy harvesting in aircraft applications. It addresses the aircraft requirements, the selection of suitable energy scavengers and the development of a power management circuitry for dealing with small quantities of input voltage or current. Most common energy scavengers are solar cells, vibration energy harvesters and thermoelectric generators. For several aircraft applications thermoelectric generators offer substantial power compared to the other scavengers with regard to the environmental conditions in an aircraft. A power management system for thermal energy harvesting which deals with the boundary conditions has been developed and tested.