An Optimized AC/DC Buck-Boost Converter for Wind Energy Harvesting Application

The need for low cost power sources was always the scope of researchers, especially for applications such as Wireless sensor networks (WSN), where the maintenance and replacement of energy storage units is costly. In this sense, energy harvesting (EH) is more reliable and cheaper due to its unlimited availability. Though, the environment conditions are usually unpredictable, which requires a specialized circuit to be used with the energy harvesters to ensure the efficient power transfer and to adapt to the variable conditions. The proposed system is a specialized EH circuit for the fluttering wind harvester. It consists of an AC/DC buck-boost converter, controlled by a low power microcontroller which adapts the performance according the variable wind conditions, giving an edge over commercial circuits for the same purpose.