Hybrid Clean Energy Harvesting for Low Power Devices

Abstract

In the recent years mobile communication has been a part and parcel of our daily life, extracting energy from surroundings like radio frequency (RF) signals is an attractive solution to the existing energy problem. Another effective source is the human body heat. This paper focuses on design of hybrid model which has two parts. First being the harvesting of energy from RF signals in the range of GSM 4G band (1800–2100 MHz) using a micro-strip patch antenna. Then rectification is conducted, followed by boosting using voltage multiplier. Second consists of thermoelectric generator (TEG) module which converts human body heat into electricity, followed by a DC-DC booster that increases output voltage level. The main objective of this work is to find a way to design a hybrid system from which energy can be harvested with RF signal and human body heat as the source, this combination provides a effective voltage up to 3–4 V, hence this can be used as a effective alternative energy source to power up low voltage device.