Power Management Circuit: Fall 2019
Summary
In this project, I designed a power management circuit (PMC) that could efficiently harvest ambient electromagnetic energy generated by railroad power lines, with an ultra-wide range of 10A-70A, using a toroidal core. We planned to use this energy to power wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) for IoT. I handled optimally designing the MPPT module of the PMC for the electromagnetic energy harvester. The major challenge of my project was to minimize the power consumed by the microcontroller while controlling the operating point of the PMC. I chose an ultra-low power microcontroller, pic18lf24k40, and Perturb and Observe (P&O) Algorithm to manage the PMC. We eventually found that MPPT was unnecessary for this application, but my work on this project served as an excellent introduction to energy harvesting techniques.
Figure 1: Block Diagram of PMC