A Power Management System for Microbial Fuel Cells With 53.02% Peak End-to-End Efficiency

This brief presents a power management system (PMS) for microbial fuel cells (MFCs). The proposed PMS has been verified with off-the-shelf components and has been tested with two emulated MFCs. The proposed PMS is comprised of a fronted converter, a supercapacitor, a charge control circuit and a second converter. In the fronted converter, the maximum power extraction from MFCs is achieved. The supercapacitor is charged to 2.5 V by the MFC via the fronted converter and is discharged to 2 V. The charge control circuit manages the stored energy at the supercapacitor and transfer the energy to the second converter. During the transfer to the second converter, voltage is boosted at the capacitor to the requirement of the load (e.g., 3.3 V). With this set-up, this self-starting system achieves an end-to-end peak efficiency of 53.04% and can support loads as high as 108.9 mW. The proposed PMS therefore achieves self-startup operation in addition to high output voltage and a higher end-to-end efficiency compared to existing PMS systems.