Study on Various Simple Power Tracking Methods for Thermoelectric Generator

For wireless sensor networks (WSN) applications, harvesting energy source is important since the sensor does not utilize power from the main power line. Among all harvesting energy sources, thermoelectric generator (TEG) becomes interesting because of its unlimited self-life (self-sufficient in energy). However, to maximize the TEG output power, then ratio between input resistance and load resistance should be maintained to be unity. For that purpose, this paper presents study on various simple power tracking such as perturbed and observe (P&O), Incremental Conductance (INC) and Three-Point Weight Comparison (TPWC). Simulation results show that all methods can keep the TEG maximum power, but with different level of power oscillation at the maximum power point (MPP)