Optimized Wind Energy Harvesting System Using Resistance Emulator and Active Rectifier for Wireless Sensor Nodes

This paper presents an optimized wind energy harvesting (WEH) system that uses a specially designed ultra-low-power-management circuit for sustaining the operation of a wireless sensor node. The proposed power management circuit has two distinct features: 1) an active rectifier using MOSFETs for rectifying the low amplitude ac voltage generated by the wind turbine generator under low wind speed condition efficiently and 2) a dc-dc boost converter with resistor emulation algorithm to perform maximum power point tracking (MPPT) under varying wind-speed conditions. As compared to the conventional diode-bridge rectifier, it is shown that the efficiency of the active rectifier with a low input voltage of 1.2 V has been increased from 40% to 70% due to the significant reduction in the ON-state voltage drop (from 0.6 to 0.15 V) across each pair of MOSFETs used. The proposed robust low-power microcontroller-based resistance emulator is implemented with closed-loop resistance feedback control to ensure close impedance matching between the source and the load, resulting in an efficient power conversion. From the experimental test results obtained, an average electrical power of 7.86 mW is harvested by the optimized WEH system at an average wind speed of 3.62 m/s, which is almost four times higher than the conventional energy harvesting method without using the MPPT.