Xavier Fernando
Communications / Networking
Wireless devices are heavily used and their high energy consumption lowers battery life. To counter this problem, wireless energy harvesting (WEH) scheme to harvest energy from the ambience is recently proposed. Energy Harvesting is the process of capturing minute amounts of energy from the environment. Energy-harvesting wireless devices efficiently capture, accumulate, store, condition and use this energy to transmit data without wires. Solar based energy harvesting sensors are more common. However, in this project we try to use an RF energy harvesting scheme. This approach will be very useful in big cities like Toronto with lot of ambient radiation. http://www.energyharvesting.net/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_harvesting
In this project an ambient energy harvesting wireless node will be designed and tested to transmit data using harvested energy.
This wireless sensor node will create a small voltage from the ambient radiation. We need to boost that to the required level and charge a supercapacitor or a rechargeable battery. This module should be able to drive a ZigBee module to transmit wireless data. The most important parameters are charging time and transmission time. We may need several hours of charging for few seconds transmission. Objective is to reduce the required charging time and power wastage.
Students will study RF energy detection, storage, maximum power transfer circuits and ZigBee transmission module. The best frequency band that will yield the highest energy need to be identified.
The whole group is responsible for the accomplishment of the project
Wireless communications, transmission portion
Energy harvesting circuitry portion
Maximum power transfer and storage portions.
XF04: Energy Harvesting Wireless Device | Xavier Fernando | Not yet submitted at No time