Silicon carbide based energy harvesting module for hostile environments

Barker, S; Miao, B; Brennan, D; Vassilevski, K; Wright, N; Horsfall, A

doi:10.4028/www.scientific.net/MSF.645-648.1093

Silicon carbide based energy harvesting module for hostile environments

Lookup NU author(s): Simon Barker, Bing Miao, Daniel Brennan, Dr Konstantin Vasilevskiy ORCiD, Professor Nick Wright, Dr Alton Horsfall

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Abstract

This paper demonstrates the first high temperature silicon carbide based energy harvesting module suitable for use in hostile environments. The system comprises a of SiC pin photovoltaic cell, HfO2 based capacitive storage bank and Schottky blocking diode. The system demonstrates the ability to harvest energy from a UV rich environment and store this energy on a HfO 2 metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitor bank. The system unifies work that has focussed on developing high temperature energy harvesting technologies, a key technology in facilitating the deployment of resilient wireless sensor nodes into hostile environments. The system demonstrates the capability to store an initial voltage of 2.3V decaying to 0.5V in 300ms with a Schottky based system. Replacing the Schottky diode with a switched system, a much lower decay rate to 1.5V in over 8s was observed. This shows that an effective harvester could be made with a switched power controller. © (2010) Trans Tech Publications.