Solar-supercapacitor harvesting system design for energy-aware applications

Supercapacitors are an emerging choice for energy buffering in field systems and their use in solar-powered field systems has been the focus of recent research. Supercapacitors offer advantages compared to rechargeable batteries for energy buffering due to their energy charge/discharge efficiency as well as environmental friendliness. Additionally, a supercapacitor-based system permits an energy-aware operation due to its superior energy-predictability. This paper describes a circuit for solar/supercapacitor energy harvesting, which includes power and voltage measurements, voltage regulation circuit and RS232 communication capability with the host embedded processor. A complete system is prototyped and its operation is discussed in terms of design parameters.