A Sustainable Soil Energy Harvesting System With Wide-Range Power-Tracking Architecture

For wide-range deployment of wireless sensing nodes in power and size-constrained Internet of Things applications, self-sustaining wireless sensors without batteries are needed. The energy supply for these ubiquitous sensing devices should harness environmental energy sources to avoid frequent battery replacement and pollution. This paper presents a new soil energy harvesting system with a power management integrated circuit (IC) for wide-range maximum power point tracking (MPPT). The output power of a soil energy cell varies widely according to the soil moisture and soil contents. To extract the maximum amount of energy from the soil, high-efficiency power management with adaptive dc-dc conversion ratios and an MPPT mechanism is essential. The proposed system is implemented with a high-efficiency dc-dc converter IC in a 0.18-μm CMOS process. The design achieves a peak tracking efficiency of 90.5% in the throughput power range from 56 μW to 1 mW at an output voltage of 3 V and system efficiency exceeding 65% over an input resistance range of the soil energy source; the peak system efficiency is 73.9%. A demonstration was undertaken of the soil energy harvesting system lighting an LED array without any chemical batteries.