Environment and Application Testbed for Low-Power Energy Harvesting System Design

Energy harvesting systems strongly depend on the nondeterministic behavior of the environment. Systematic and thorough evaluation of these systems demands for tools that consistently reproduce these conditions and allow for closely integrating highly dynamic applications. To this end, a testbed is introduced that allows us to precisely and repeatedly force an energy harvesting system under test using thermal and radiative sources in a controlled environment while allowing to sinking arbitrary current profiles. The coordinated control of the boundary conditions on the input and output sides enables detailed evaluation, exploration, and dimensioning of different aspects of energy management and harvesting systems. By reproducing environmental traces at a higher rate than normally occurring in nature, the testbed allows us to substantially shorten the time needed for experimental evaluations. This approach enables fast and consistent evaluation of energy harvesting systems under a wide coverage of operating conditions.