Battery life has always been a big pain for consumers. When choosing a device, they do check how easy and fast it is to charge it. Lately, it has also become important for consumers to buy greener solutions which don’t harm environment.
Therefore, it is normal that the next natural step in electronic evolution is devices that are self-rechargeable. They can become energy-sufficient by harvesting and utilising energy from sources that surround them: solar, RF, thermal, and vibration. This is exactly what we do at e-peas: helping product owners and design houses shift to energy autonomous devices.
Such devices are particularly important for large industries, airports, and supermarkets where there are a lot of devices like sensors which run out of batteries at different times. Changing batteries incurs additional costs that can be avoided if energy harvesting is adopted.
How to shift to energy autonomous device
There is a lot of energy surrounding the devices we use: solar, thermal, vibration, and radio frequency (RF). This energy can be used to charge devices.
Depending on the available energy source, a device will require integration of an energy harvester such as a PV cell, thermoelectric generator, piezo material, electromagnetic transducer, or antenna.
One more necessary component is a power management unit, which optimizes the energy transfer to the storage element (rechargeable battery, supercapacitor, etc.) and supplies the power system (the application). Such a solution provides continuous power for years and solves the bottleneck of replacing batteries.
To see how this works, let’s consider a smartwatch, which can recharge from indoor and/or outdoor light. Three major elements are needed for this technology to work in a smartwatch platform:
- An energy harvester (in this case, a PV cell) for absorbing light and converting it into energy
- An integrated circuit for efficiently transferring the PV cell energy into a storage element
- A storage element for storing the collected energy, typically a Li-ion or Li-polymer battery, already present in standard smartwatches
Once all three components are integrated into a device, its battery lifetime can be sensibly extended, or in best cases, it can even run for many years without the need of replacing a battery or putting it on a charging station.
Now, imagine that such devices like watches, ear buds, fire alarms, TV commanders, kitchen scale, electronic shelf labels, pet trackers, all sort of sensors (air quality, security, humidity, etc.), e-readers, smart thermostats, smart locks, and even mobile phones could live forever without any need to change a battery.
While it sounds futuristic, it is already reality. e-peas is one of the leading companies that help design houses, product owners and research centers create devices that are self-sufficient in terms of energy.
