Conditioning Circuit of Energy Harvesting Device in Substations

A capacitive energy harvesting device is proposed to harvest energy from electric field in substations. It can achieve electric energy from electromagnetic environment for wireless smart sensors. It’s obvious that the surface of it can generate charge when it’s put in the electric field. However, the output voltage of it is unstable and it cannot power directly the wireless sensors. So a conditioning circuit is essential for the device. With the purpose of designing and analyzing conditioning circuit, a simple model is used to equal the energy harvesting unit. In order to power the sensors steadily, the conditioning circuit should consist of some subcircuits such as AC-DC rectifier and DC-DC converter. At last, a simple digital temperature sensor is used to study the operating characteristics of the conditioning circuit in the stage of experiment.