Micro-Solar Power Systems Design and Analysis

Micro-Solar Power Systems Design and Analysis~Design and Analysis Micro-Solar Power system for Wireless Sensor Networks. Wireless Sensor Networks are fundamentally limited by their energy storage resources and the power they obtain from their environment. Several micro-solar powered designs have been developed to address this important problem but little analysis is available on key design trade-offs. In recent years, energy harvesting, especially, solar energy harvesting has become increasingly important as a way to improve lifetime and maintenance cost of WSN. Compared to well-addressed macro-solar power systems, the solar energy harvesting for micro-solar power systems is more constrained in energy budget and use of energy, and is under active research. Our contributions in this paper are three-fold: First, we propose a model for micro-solar power systems and develop a taxonomy of the micro-solar design space identifying key components, design choices, interactions, difficulties and trade offs. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents our model for the micro-solar power system; Sections 3, 4, 5 and 6 show how each of the four components of a micro-solar power system can be modeled identifying various design choices. System Architecture. In general, any solar-powered system consists of the following components: the external environment, the solar collector, energy storage and the load (Figure 1). The solar energy from the environment is collected by the solar collector and is made available for the operation of the load. The four components of a solar-powered sensor node interact with each other. The design decision for each component will dictate the energy flows between them and the overall behavior of the system. For the rest of this paper we will evaluate the performance of a micro-solar power system in terms of the energy flow of each component. Solar Collector : In a micro-solar power system, the solar energy from the environment is converted to electric energy by the solar collector. The solar collector includes two main components: the solar cell, which converts the photon into electricity; and the regulator, which conditions the output power of the solar cell for energy transfer to the storage. The amount of solar energy out of the solar collector E sol is determined by the following factors: (1) solar radiation, (2) solar-cell characteristics, (3) the operating point of solar-cell. Item (1) was discussed in Section 4. In this section, we discuss (2) and (3).

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