Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks Volume 2013, Article ID 232438, 14 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/232438
Research Article Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting for Building Energy Management Wireless Sensor Networks Wensi Wang, Victor Cionca, Ningning Wang, Mike Hayes, Brendan O’Flynn, and Cian O’Mathuna Microsystems Group, Tyndall National Institute, Cork, Ireland Correspondence should be addressed to Wensi Wang;
[email protected] Received 12 March 2013; Accepted 14 May 2013 Academic Editor: Al-Sakib Khan Pathan Copyright © 2013 Wensi Wang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. A thermoelectric energy harvester powered wireless sensor networks (WSNs) module designed for building energy management (BEM) applications is built and tested in this work. An analytic thermoelectric generator (TEG) electrical model is built and verified based on parameters given in manufacturer data sheets of Bismuth Telluride TEGs. A charge pump/switching regulator two-stage ultra-low voltage step-up DC/DC converter design is presented in this work to boost the
