A simple and efficient solar energy harvesting for wireless sensor node

Abstract

There are various forms of green energy available in the environment that can be extract, like thermal, mechanical, solar, acoustic, wind, etc and several techniques have been applied to harvest green energy from the environment source [1]. One of the methods is using solar PV cells to harvest the energy from sun. Various type of techniques have been developed i.e. stationary solar tracking system will only have maximum current at noon and rotating solar tracking by using motors will consume the energy for motor etc. In this paper we have proposed a method to obtain solar energy by employing a tracking technique based on gear and spring driver to follow the sun's position so the current will be higher throughout the day. The output parameter values related to current (I), Voltage (V) and Power (P) of photovoltaic module are determine the characteristic of PV cell. The simulations are carried out using Matlab environment.