Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange
Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [energy-harvesting]

Energy harvesting devices generate power from an external source. While they may include solar, kinetic and other energy sources that are also used on a large scale the term is normally reserved for small low-power applications. An example is a wristwatch that uses kinetic energy while the wearer is walking to power the watch.

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Stealing energy from radio towers or power lines

From this answer: How much energy can be harvested from nearby radio towers or power lines? What circuits would you use? How much would you have to absorb for it to be noticeable by the producers or by other consumers? I see a lot of stories,…
endolith
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Lowest voltage drop diode possible

I am harvesting energy from an NFC device using a tuned antenna on my PCB. Through this method, I am able to generate about 3.05V. I would like to charge a super capacitor using the power harvested from the NFC device. To do this I have used the…
Anthony Phan
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RF Energy Harvesting

Why can energy invested in RF radiation not be harvested fully? What are the main factors that affect this? Is there any significant research nowadays that fully describes this process? I stand on the conclusion: "Energy moves from one form to…
user76920
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Is it possible to use Kinetic energy to power small devices?

I've tried looking around for as much information as I could gather to build really small wearable electronics that could power themselves by generating energy with movement. I know that the technology already exists in watches. There are watches…
user11519
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LED as power generator

As many of you probably know, a normal light emitting diode, while very handy as a cheap and ubiquitous indicator, can double as a power generator. The mechanism is the same that is exploited in photovoltaic cells, aka solar panels. When an LED is…
Vladimir Cravero
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How can overproduction of electric power be a problem to the grid?

Recently, in Brazil, we had a major shutdown of the electrical grid of the entire country (wich is mostly interconnected across the majority of the states). After official investigation, the culprit was determined to be the excessive production of…
Sieg Novak
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LTC3525 Shutdown feature reacts to wrong thresholds

I've be thankful if somebody can help me with my energy harvesting board problem. I've created an energy harvesting board based on the step-ups Linear Technology LTC3105 and LTC3525-3.3. Below please find the schematic and board design. A small 3V…
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Solar Powered Trash Compactor (Chicago Big Belly)

I live in Chicago and I walk past these trash cans every day that have a large solar cell on the top of them. These trash cans are supposed to collect energy which runs a trash compactor inside. This theoretically results in more room for more trash…
user10005
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Harvesting energy from old batteries?

Old batteries (I mean AA, AAA -sized 1.5v ones) usually have some residual energy, which can be used, for example, to charge mobile phones/pads. I have seen some schematics on the Net, but all of them try to connect old batteries in series without…
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Teg energy harvesting by ltc3108

I am currently doing a project regarding thermal energy harvesting using TEC Peltier modules and LTC3108 IC chip. This IC chip requires inductors that act as transformer to step up the voltage input. I constructed the circuit according to the…
Lara
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Maximum power out of thermoelectric generator?

The conventional method to extract maximum amount of energy from ThermoElectric Generator (TEG) is to load it with a resistance equal to the TEG's internal resistance as the maximum power transfer theorem. However, if the load of TEG is not…
emnha
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DIY kinetic energy harvester

I'd like to make a DIY kinetic energy harvester and wish to use the electromagnetic method to generate electricity. So far I know the following materials that I'm going to use: NdFeB magnet Induction coil made up of copper wire Dry cell (for…
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Is it possible to power a MCU with a button press / touch?

I hope to use a piezoelectric button to harvest and produce a sufficient energy burst to power ON and bootup a MSP430 for a few ms enough to update a simple data structure (e.g. two integers stored in nonvolatile memory e.g. FRAM) and then power…
bd3lk
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How to calculate the impedance of a rectifier?

I am working on RF energy harvesting. Now I am trying to calculate the impedance of the rectifier, in order to do the impedance matching. An antenna (50 ohm) receives RF signal (915 MHz) and finally become DC by the rectifier and stored into the…
penli
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How do the cassette tape adapters get their energy

I was wondering where the cassette tape adaptors get their energy, looking at this image http://car-mods.wonderhowto.com/how-to/hack-your-cars-cassette-deck-into-wireless-bluetooth-music-player-0139843/ there is clearly some electronics. I can't…
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