Solar Energy Harvesting for Outdoor Applications

Sammanfattning: The use of solar cells as a solution for different energy harvesting applications has seen a significant growth during the last few years. With recent advances in the power conversion efficiency and manufacturability of organic photovoltaic cells these systems can be made even cheaper and more available for consumers, opening up new ways for solar technology to be implemented into products. This project investigates how an energy harvesting system suitable for low power applications can be constructed with the use of an organic photovolatic cell as the energy harvesting source. It also explains how this energy is sampled via a regulatory integrated circuit chip and how this all is connected via a PCB. All components were carefully evaluated, tested and assembled to form a final energy harvesting system. The project also resulted in a simulation tool that can simulate the performance of the energy harvesting system as implemented in a specific battery charging application. From these simulations it is concluded that the system is very dependent on the organic photovoltaic cell azimuth angle. It performs well in south facing harvesting, allowing for a substantial battery charging potential, but struggles to provide charging power for a north facing OPV. However, depending on the magnitude of draining current of the battery, a north facing OPV can still provide enough charging current to be considered feasible for implementation. The report concludes that from a performance point of view, an OPV based energy harvesting system can extract enough energy to provide real value for potential future Verisure products.