UR-SolarCap: An Open Source Intelligent Auto-Wakeup Solar/Wind Energy Harvesting System for Supercapacitor based Energy Buffering  



We present and share a versatile design for an energy harvesting system that couples solar panels or wind turbines with supercapacitor buffers for storage. The system is an attractive option for powering computational systems deployed in "field settings" where power infrastructure is inaccessible. In these scenarios, supercapacitors offer a particularly compelling advantage over electrochemical batteries because of their ability to survive many more charge-discharge cycles.

We continue our research on energy harvesting and will make updates to this page as new publications and open resources become available.

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Selected Publications

  1. M. Habibzadeh, M. Hassanalieragh, A. Ishikawa, T. Soyata, G. Sharma,; "Hybrid Solar-Wind Energy Harvesting for Embedded Applications: Supercapacitor-based System Architectures and Design Tradeoffs"; IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine. vol. 17. no. 4, pp. 29-63, Fourthquarter 2017. [link]
  2. M. Hassanalieragh, T. Soyata, A. Nadeau, G. Sharma,; "UR-SolarCap: An Open Source Intelligent Auto-Wakeup Solar Energy Harvesting System for Supercapacitor based Energy Buffering"; IEEE Access; vol. 4, pp. 542-557, 2016. [link]
  3. A. Nadeau, M. Hassanalieragh, G. Sharma, T. Soyata,; "Energy awareness for supercapacitors using Kalman filter state-of-charge tracking"; Journal of Power Sources; vol. 296, pp. 383–391, Nov. 2015. [pdf]
  4. A. Nadeau and G. Sharma, and T.Soyata,; "State-of-charge estimation for supercapacitors: a Kalman filtering formulation"; IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP); May 2014, pp. 2213--2217. [pdf]

Disclaimer: We share the UR-SolarCap designs in the hope that they will be useful to the community. The open designs comes with no warranties what so ever. We try to ensure that the UR-SolarCap designs can be used "out of the box" and try and respond to user reports of problems and queries but do understand that our response time can vary.