Design-Time Tool for Energy Harvesting Applications

A Matlab-LTSpice based tool is presented in this paper. It has been developed to help the designer to add Energy Harvesting (EH) capabilities to a generic electronic device that is being developed. The realized easy-to-use tool allows to quick evaluate several EH solutions at design time, contributing to considerably reduce both design time and costs because no hardware prototypes are needed. The tool is based on a set of pre-designed EH circuits covering all the main EH sources available in industrial applications (i.e. light, thermal gradients and vibrations) and drives the designer in the choice of the most suitable one accordingly with both the estimated environmental working conditions and the estimated power consumption profile of the specific electronic device that is being developed.