TE-Power-One and TE-Power-Plus
You understand the advantages of thermal energy harvesting. But still you find it difficult to determine the power budget you have in your particular target environment. It takes something to indicate how much energy you could possibly harvest from your hot spots of choice.
Micropelt’s energy harvesting evaluation kits are designed to determine the available power available to drive your wireless devices. TE-Power-One provides ’gross‘ harvesting indications by letting you measure the basic harvesting factors including actual ΔT across the thermogenerator device and the resulting thermo-voltage. Current and power are easily calculated.
If you require battery-like stable power at a fixed voltage you want to choose a TE-Power-Plus evaluation kit which includes the TE-Power-One plus a plug-on DC-DC converter which allows you to set the desired voltage after having determined the available gross power in TE-Power-One mode.
A datasheet of this board is available as a » pdf document (387 KB). For more information see the following info sheet downloadable also as a pdf (408 KB) » Thermal Energy Harvesting through Waste Heat Recovery.
The diagrams below show measured output current and voltage of the harvester alone at heat source temperatures from 40 ºC and 100 ºC versus a heat sink temperature of 25 ºC (ambient).
