Design and Model of Low-Power Wireless Sensor Node Powered by Hybrid Heterogeneous Energy Harvesters with Energy Gap Coverage

This work presents a novel wireless sensor node hardware design with built-in main and secondary energy storages to overcome the energy gap issue occurred in the energy harvesting scheme. The proposed sensor node was designed and modeled in the MATLAB Simulink environment. It features fast start up time due to the small capacity main energy storage, in addition to long energy gap coverage due to the large capacity secondary energy storage. The simulation results show an improvement in the sensor node start up time of about few seconds only with 9.5 h of energy gap coverage, where this period is more than enough to guarantee that the ambient energy would be available again. The experimental results agreed with the simulation model; hence, it proved that the proposed system succeeded to accurately matches the simulation with no major errors of less 2% only.