Cold-Starting Switched-Inductor Bipolar Power Management for Dynamic Thermoelectric Harvesting

This paper describes the current results of research done on an electrical power management circuit for a dynamic temperature energy harvesting generator. It has been designed for use on the fuselage of an aircraft, where high temperature gradients can appear during start and landing. For laboratory tests, the system was put into a climate chamber to emulate similar temperatures from −40 to 20 degrees Celsius. In this work it has been focused mainly on the power conversion side to deliver energy to small systems in the voltage range of 1.8 to 5V. Therefore, a recently at Fraunhofer IIS developed dc-dc converter ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) was used to handle both positive and negative voltages – which are obtained from the thermoelectric generator (TEG) in the scenario. The chip can cold-start from 35 mV and has an integrated MPPT (maximum-powerpoint-tracking) unit.