Handbook of Energy Harvesting Power Supplies and Applications

With a strong foundation in material science and electronic engineering, this book describes the fundamentals and principles in the field of energy harvesting. Using a systems approach from overall system design down to device and component level, it provides the necessary theory and information to develop energy harvesting power supplies. The book explains overall system design and quantitative assumptions on environmental energy. Each block composing an energy harvesting power supply is analyzed and the book discusses trade-offs related to the design of the required buildings. The contributors cover different energy transducer technologies such as piezo-electric, electro-dynamic, solar-cells, and thermo-electric generators.

Peter Spies studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Erlangen / Germany and graduated with a Dipl.-Ing. degree in 1997. Since 1998, he is with the Fraunhofer IIS, power efficient systems department. He was working on the field of multistandard frontends and system simulations for communication applications. Since 2001 he is group manager of the group "integrated energy supplies." He is doing research and design of integrated circuits, systems and software for power and battery management, energy transmission and energy harvesting. Most important applications are wireless sensor networks and hybrid and electrical vehicles. Other areas of his work are sensor signal processing and interface technologies like wireless transceivers or transponders.

Dr. Loreto Mateu received the equivalent of the M.Sc. degree in electronic engineering at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain, in 2002. She is finishing her Ph.D. in the Department of Electronic Engineering of UPC. Since June 2007, she is with the Department of Power Efficient Systems in the Fraunhofer IIS. Her area of research is energy harvesting to power wearable devices. Her focus is on piezoelectric materials, thermoelectric generators, and electromagnetic power conversion. She has several publications on this topic. In addition, she is also interested in dc/dc converters to power wearable devices from harvested electrical energy.

Markus Pollak studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Erlangen/Germany and graduated with Dipl.-Ing. degree in 2000. Since February 2001 he works at the Fraunhofer IIS, department of power efficient systems. He was working in the design of integrated circuits for RF-transceivers and power management circuits. His recent projects are concerned with dc-dc converters for energy harvesting applications and programming of microcontrollers for wireless transceivers.