Author Topic: Solar Energy Harvesting  (Read 5008 times)

Cosmoneer

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Solar Energy Harvesting
« on: May 15, 2017, 11:05:47 AM »
Successfully scaling down a real spacecraft power system to a usable size, especially in an indoor environment is a difficult obstacle to overcome.  Through testing and evaluation of example circuits and various solar cell options, as well as reviewing other users discoveries has left us with a renewed interest in incorporating solar energy harvesting as a viable option for the Cosmoneer.

Back in 2013 when the Cosmoneer idea was beginning to take shape, Solar energy as a power source was the focus for nearly 6 months.  Four years later, we believe we can incorporate ideas presented by others on the internet as a means to successfully power the Cosmoneer (albeit intermittently.)

In this video, Shahriar shares his demonstration of the LTC3105 energy harvesting chip and suggests using two of them in series with a super capacitor in-between.  What he demonstrates is the second circuit harvesting as much usable power as possible from the super capacitor.

https://youtu.be/lrELRVFEx_s
(from Shahriar's blog post, here:  http://thesignalpath.com/blogs/2013/01/03/tutorial-and-experiments-on-energy-harvesting-ics/)


As with all things Cosmoneer, the idea is to constrain the Cosmoneer to problems faced by typical spacecraft, only on a smaller scale.